I always love when people talk about the paperless medical office. It’s as if they believe that after implementing an EMR they will no longer have to have paper in the office. Turns out, EMR software can print out a lot of paper if you’re not careful.

While ePrescribing is on the horizon in many places, the harsh reality is that many still have to print out prescriptions. Add in the requirements around prescribing controlled substances and in almost every state doctors using an EMR are still having to print out prescriptions.

In my clinic, it always felt wrong to print out an entire sheet of paper for one prescription. Eventually we got our vendor to support printing out multiple prescriptions on one sheet of paper. That helped, but many patients only need one prescription so that’s a lot of wasted paper. Beyond the green movement, wasted paper = wasted money.

With this background, that’s why I was intrigued by the DYMO Prescription Printer that I saw at MGMA. I’d worked with DYMO label printers before since the lab I worked with printed off lab labels directly from our EMR software. It makes sense that they could use a little bit larger printer and do the same thing with prescriptions.

It’s pretty obvious to see the paper saving benefits of using a DYMO printer like this, but I think the other advantage to this printer is its size. The printer has such a small footprint that you could easily put it a lot of places that a standard printer just won’t fit.

I admit that I haven’t done a full analysis of the savings using this printer compared with a standard printer. However, the nice thing about the DYMO printers is that they’re thermal printers which means that you’ll never have to spend money on ink or toner to print prescriptions. That’s pretty nice.

I’d love to have some of my readers try out the DYMO Prescription Printer to let me know what they think and whether they think I should add it to my list of EMR related technology products. Maybe I should see if DYMO will give one away to one of my readers to try out and report back.

I always love when small adjustments to current technology can make a huge difference. Or in other words, did I just write a post about a label printer? Sometimes the best innovations are subtle changes.

UPDATE: I just got word that DYMO will be happy to provide a product for review. So, drop me a line on my Contact Us page if you’re interested in trying it in your clinic.

On EMR Update a user posted an interesting security problem with their EMR software:

I was on our user’s forum reading about a security flaw in our EMR. There were some discussions about the ability to circumnavigate prescription privileges and have your staff write themselves narcotics. We couldn’t figure out if anyone had done anything like this in our office, so I had our IT guy spend some time in the system. He was able to determine that one of our staff members had in fact been printing out an old script that had been written in the past and manually faxing it to pharmacies around town. The problem with the software is that it lets you print out a script from a locked note, and it prints out with the present date so it can be filled!

Has anyone else had staff in their EMR get away with writing bogus prescriptions? If you don’t know, you may want to check your system. Obviously this is an intolerable situation. We are hoping our vendor will take this seriously for once and get it fixed quickly. Otherwise, we will be forced to look elsewhere for a replacement EMR that doesn’t have this issue.

I love this story, because it highlights a number of interesting things.

1. The challenge of creating a secure, usable, and effective EMR. It’s NOT easy.

2. How responsive will your EMR vendor be to end user requests?

3. What would it take for you to switch EMR software? Can you imagine?