July 2000 • Volume 6 • Number 7
'You just gotta believe'
Wenner: king of EMR advice
"Passionate" is not a strong enough word to describe Allen Wenner, M.D.
Wenner, a practicing FP and clinical application design VP for Prime Time Medical Software in Columbia, S.C., drew large crowds at the recent TEPR: 2000 (Toward an Electronic Patient Record) conference in San Francisco, even when some of his sessions were meant for small groups. Why? Wenner has all kinds of advice about electronic medical record systems.
"You better get on the train, because it's leaving the station," he said several times.
But everything Wenner says is not so cliché. He'll remind you of the way Wal-Mart adopted bar code scanners when all those other retailers turned them down. And the way pharmacists (pharmacists!) transformed their business practices with electronic record systems. And the way the banking industry resuscitated itself by implementing electronic methods and cutting labor.
You'll also hear about the way some doctors find more time to sit and listen and learn by using patients to help input EMR data while waiting for their appointments.
That might be just a minute or two in the exam room, but think a moment about what that might mean to your practice.
"You just gotta believe," Wenner says. "The world is not flat; you will go on; you will win."
Wenner will just as easily admit to the problems with EMRs. First, he says, if you can't see past two years -- the two years an EMR system will be more trouble than it's worth -- forget it. Because you will indeed lose money.
"The challenge?" he asks. "Can you do it before you go broke?"
And he'll readily point to statistics showing unreal amounts of money practices are spending to get rid of their EMRs.
But just assume your future includes several more computers than you have now, says Wenner. It probably will, given the way those devices have cropped up elsewhere in society.
Put a few in the waiting room. Have them running a Q&A program designed to gain valuable patient data. Assume that anyone currently familiar with e-mail can operate it. Also figure that the majority of those folks unable to deal with the process will be accompanied by someone who can.
If you're Allen Wenner, you took those incremental steps years ago and now boast such an electronically oriented setting that not even dictation is permitted in your office. His method works and works well, and he'll challenge any other doc under the sun to an efficiency and speed duel.
And you know who'll probably win? Wenner. He had a head start.
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department.
Copyright © 2000 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
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