When Mills-Peninsula moves to the new medical center this fall, thousands of paper charts will not. In the place of those iconic hospital chart rooms will be smaller spaces throughout the building that house miles of cable making Mills-Peninsula ready for the electronic age.

Not only will there be more space for patient care, but the advantages of electronic medical records will be part and parcel of the patient experience.

April 1, 2009, Mills-Peninsula helped make history by becoming one of less than 2 percent of U.S. hospitals at the time that had adopted a comprehensive electronic health record, giving it a jump on the conversion sought by the Obama Administration.

Since then the hospital has made good on its goals of saving time, improving patient safety and access to medical information.

“We did a study of the time spent in a typical day of a nurse or technician looking for charts at the hospital before the electronic record and found it was 9 to 11 percent on average,” says Michael K. Wood, M.D., chief medical officer. “That has been completely eliminated.”

Another key advantage Dr. Wood sees to going electronic is safety. “When a patient with an allergy comes into the Emergency Department, every health care provider who sees that patient is alerted through their electronic record.”

Doctors, nurses, pharmacy and lab technicians all have potentially lifesaving information at their fingertips. Lab results and X-rays are electronically available to doctors as soon as they are completed, for immediate analysis, diagnosis and treatment.

Because doctors’ orders and prescriptions are entered into a computer rather than in handwritten orders, pharmacists and other caregivers have no trouble interpreting the information.

“This greatly reduces the possibility of transcription errors and other medical mistakes,” Dr. Wood says.

Mills-Peninsula recently received national recognition for its electronic medical record implementation.

“The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), an industry authority in health care information technology, rated us in the top two percent of U.S. hospitals that use the technology for the high degree to which we have put it into use,” Dr. Wood said. “We are on our way to becoming fully paperless.”