A Conservative Area

(EMAILWIRE.COM, March 06, 2007 ) Rohnert, CA -- Eleven years ago, when Gregory Salko, MD started to computerize the records of his busy family practice, the Phoenix Health Care Group, in Whites Crossing, Pennsylvania, it was a farsighted decision for a conservative coal-mining area with an aging population, where his was the only practice started since World War II. “I worried that the patients, especially the older ones, might feel I wasn’t giving them proper attention if I sat typing into a computer while they told me about their problems,” he remembers. But he persevered, reasoning that the legible charts it would produce would lead to better patient care, lower costs and fewer potential errors. He also needed a system that would adapt to his way of working, not one where he would have to change his methods to suit a set program. “I wanted something that would produce good basic notes that I could add to whatever I wanted. No one ever taught me how to use computers - at college I used the slide rule – so it had to be something I could easily alter myself.”His search led him to ChartWare, the Rohnert Park, California, company whose computerized record-keeping earned five stars from Family Practice Management, journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Now he and his 32-year-old son, David, together with four physician assistants, have a completely paperless office: they see about 450 patients a week in the clinic and 10-15 in the hospital plus others in the nursing home and personal care home that are part of the Phoenix group. They even make house calls. “Everyone loves it,” Salko says. “The patients can see for themselves that computers save time and mistakes. They like having a print-out of their treatment plan to take home and know that, by the time they get to the pharmacy after a visit, we will have automatically faxed in their prescriptions.“The staff likes not having to think at the end of the day about having to write up the charts on twenty patients: they did all the notes while the patients were there. The specialists like not having to struggle to read handwritten notes. The nursing home, hospital and ER like it because they have an orderly list of problems, allergies, and medications for every patient that we send there.”Salko says the system has proved itself time after time and cites the kind of objective evidence that he knows other doctors will find persuasive: in the past eleven years no audit has ever uncovered any problems. ###Contact:ChartWareReg Greenreggreen@charter.netwww.charter.net

Joseph Nchor

reggreen@charter.net