TotalVision Eyecare Center’s transition to Electronic Health Records (EHR) is beneficial to our patients and our staff. If you have been to our office after June of 2012, you are familiar with our new electronic records. Our EHR allows Dr. Lefland to enter physician notes, download all your medications electronically from your pharmacy’s secure data base, transmit prescription orders over the internet, order tests, and generate reports of test results.
Using electronic records will make our office more efficient in several important ways. Once all our patients have come in for exams in the new system we will no longer need to file and re-file charts or worry about accidentally misplacing charts. All of our patient’s information will be keystrokes away. If need be, Dr. Lefland can now access our patient’s health records remotely, and can securely communicate with referring or consulting doctors and exchange consult notes and clinical data. Dr. Lefland now sends patient prescriptions electronically to your pharmacy avoiding questions from pharmacists regarding handwriting.
The Federal government has found in that during tragic events such as Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the California fires showcased the benefits of electronic record keeping. Those who were injured or sick were more easily treated and had better outcomes than those where no medical records were available. Therefore, they have put forth great effort in encouraging practitioners to implement an EMR system and adhere to list of criteria to improve care. These criteria are called Meaningful Use. We take pride in fact that we have been within the Meaningful Use criteria from the beginning of our implementation.
Our patient’s privacy is of the utmost importance to us and we strictly follow the national standards that were created for the safety, sharing, and protection of medical record information via the HIPAA Privacy Rule which established standards for electronic record transfer. So while, we are committed to make our patient care more efficient we are also committed to keeping their information secure.