• Have you ever laughed at a doctor joke about how unreadable a doctor's handwriting is?
• Would it surprise you to learn that doctors sometimes cannot read other doctor's notes or even their own notes?
• Do you ever wonder exactly what your doctor has written on the prescription pad?
• Are you sure that the pharmacist has given you the medication your doctor prescribed for you and not just guessed as he tried to decipher the scribbling on a prescription pad?
• Do you worry that information buried under a pile of paper on your doctor's desk or somewhere in his office might get lost?

Well, you are not alone. We do too. That is why we have been using an electronic medical record since 1996. The software program we use was called "Logician" which was originally developed by an internist in the Portland area, now part of the GE Medical Technology and renamed "Centricity".

• All of your medical records are stored on a computer. This includes the notes your doctor makes about your medical history and examination, laboratory and other test results, consultants' notes and correspondence.
• Your electronic medical records are always available to your care provider, whether you are seeing your regular doctor, or talking to the covering doctor on the phone. He even has access to them from home when he takes calls after hours!
• Prescriptions are printed and that means that you can read exactly what medication was prescribed for you, before you take it to the drug store. Even better, it won't be misread by the pharmacist.
• Orders for tests are printed so you know the exact tests ordered, and why they were ordered.
• After each visit, you can request a printed summary of all the medications and orders that your doctor has recommended so they are not forgotten when you get home.

Electronic records are as secure as, if not more than, paper ones. Our patient records are stored in a computer server inside the clinic in a locked server room. When connecting from home, we use technology called virtual private network to make sure that your information is secured when traveling on the internet.

Patients transferring from another clinic, especially one where he has been patient for a long time, carries a large stack of record, sometimes dating back for years. It is impractical, if not impossible, both for reasons of your doctor's time and our office's storage space, to keep and know everything that has been done in the past.

We are taking pictures of our patients to include on the electronic records to help us identify our patient, so we may serve you better. It is done strictly for this purpose, and you may decline if you object to it.