  The “Paper Chase” is a term often associated with lawyers. But doctors and their staff members can relate all too well to the phrase. As a matter of fact, doctors typically are required to find and review multiple pieces of paper such as medical records and referral forms every time they see a patient. Staff members wrestle with even more pulp—as they need to manage an array of incoming and outgoing paper from medical records to insurance documents to school physical forms and the like. Certainly, chasing down all of this pulp results in several problems for physician practices including:
But many practices, have not taken the leap toward EMRs, yet. There are, however, many ways that practices can better manage documents without buying a full-blown EMR. Rosemarie Nelson, a consultant with the Medical Group Management Association, suggests that physician practices use a simple scanner to create their own electronic document management systems.1 “Your staff can scan those pieces of paper into folders for each patient, along with tests results and outside correspondence. Nurses and other staff members with access to the office network can then retrieve the electronic patient information within seconds to support phone calls and to identify components of care due to each patient,” writes Nelson in a report that ran in Physicians Practice magazine. Elizabeth Woodcock, an Atlanta-based practice management consultant, says healthcare providers can also make the paper chase a little more bearable by:
1. Nelson, R. Not Paperless Yet? Physicians Practice Magazine, October 2004 2. Keaveney, Bob. 5 Keys to a Better Practice, Physicians Practice Magazine, June 2004 
 
By PatrickAt Mediconnect, spring-cleaning is more of a mindset than a passing seasonal task. That’s why Belinda and I are forever listening to our customers, studying industry trends, training staff—and generally just fine-tuning all that we do to make sure we bring you the best healthcare communications services possible. It’s a philosophy that has been ingrained in our work lives by Joe Sameh, one of the founders of Mediconnect: “We don’t believe in resting on our laurels. Instead, we believe that we have to constantly study what we are doing—and then strive to make it better. We are in a perpetual state of spring cleaning, ready to roll up our sleeves and make the changes necessary to bring you the best call center services available,” Sameh says. For example, Mediconnect recently made a big change to serve its customers better by becoming part of American Medical Alert Corp. (AMAC), an Oceanside, N.Y.-based provider of healthcare communication services and advanced home health monitoring technologies. In addition to operating eight communications centers under local trade names, AMAC’s portfolio includes personal emergency response systems, emergency response monitoring and reminder devices, disease management monitoring appliances and healthcare communication solution services. By becoming a part of the AMAC family, Mediconnect can tap into the vast resources of numerous call centers spread out across the country. What does this do for you, our valued healthcare provider customers? Quite a bit actually. Consider the following: Call volume for medical practices increases between five and six o’clock Monday through Friday. But this is no longer a problem because Mediconnect can now use operators across the country when call volumes start to escalate. When call volume spikes in the Midwest, Mediconnect automatically utilizes operators in the East, Mountain and Western time zones to handle the overflow. The end result: You get your calls answered promptly—and because we don’t have to add staff to provide such stellar service, costs stay low. This newly acquired geographic reach also enables us to handle power interruptions causes by severe local weather and natural disasters. For example, if thunderstorms knock out phone lines or a blizzard strands employees at home here in the Midwest, we can still serve our customers because we can tap into call centers across the country. In addition to joining AMAC, we also have been working hard to improve our technologies and services. Backed by one year of planning by a group of more than 30 people and a $1 million investment, Mediconnect has implemented a major service and reliability upgrade. Through this upgrade, we have installed numerous T1 lines, cables, switches and servers. With this revamped technology in place, we offer more of what you are looking for—efficient and undeniably reliable service. With these improvements, we are not letting the dust settle. Instead, Mediconnect is simply offering the best healthcare communications service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to physician practices, hospitals and other health care providers across the country.
 
By BelindaWe live in an age of excess. There’s too much paper. Too much food on our plates. Too much information. Too many e-mail messages. Simply put, there’s too much everywhere we turn. Not surprisingly, then, when Patrick and I started talking about spring cleaning a while back, we realized that spring cleaning has taken on a whole new meaning in our modern—yet way less efficient—lives. Spring cleaning now seems to be more about organizing and de-cluttering, instead of the deep cleaning sessions that seemed to be associated with the term in years gone by. After a rough winter here in Chicago, though, I was ready for a fresh start. So, with this somewhat modern take on spring-cleaning, I decided that I would do it right this year. After searching the Internet for advice (talk about information overload!), I came across a useful guide to getting organized from Sarah Aguirre on the About.com Guide to Housekeeping. Here, in a nutshell, is a summary of her spring-cleaning approach—applied to both your home and office life: Step 1: Analyze Your Situation Take a moment and go through your house—room by room. Jot down where there are problem areas—listing just one problem at the top of each page. For example, you could produce pages with headings such as “Piles of mail on the dining room table” or “Toys shoved into the corner of the living room” or “Coats thrown on the floor of the entry closet.” You can do the same thing at work. Take a few minutes to go through both your physical office and your computer in the same manner. As such, you could come up with sheets with headings such as “Files piled high in the corner” or “3,531 e-mails languishing in In Box” or “Pens scattered throughout the office.” Step 2: Understand the Root Cause of Problems For each of the problem areas identified, try to pinpoint exactly why the problem persists. For example, when trying to figure out why the mail is piled on the table, you might conclude that the dining room is the first room that you walk into after retrieving the mail from outside—and you typically don’t have time to sort through the mail on your way into the house. Or you might decide that you keep e-mails in your inbox because you want to hold on to a record of transactions with customers – yet have not bothered to learn how to archive old messages. Step 3: Come up with Solutions After analyzing and understanding the problems, it’s time to come up with a fix. Here, Aguirre suggests that you ask yourself the following questions:
Step 4: Make Changes, Organize—and Stay the Course After buying the organizational tools and making any necessary physical changes to your living or working spaces, it’s time to start organizing. Everything should have a place—and you should consistently put everything in its place. It’s a simple mantra that will help get your organizational efforts started—and help keep you organized for the long haul. After using this approach to organize both my home and office, I suddenly had some extra time on my hands. So, for good measure and because I was on a roll, I decided to take on some good old-fashioned spring-cleaning—the kind where you scrub every nook and cranny and make sure that every inch of your home of office shines. To keep my efforts on course, I found these helpful hints from Heloise, the housekeeping guru at Good Housekeeping magazine:
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