MMRGlobal, Inc. (fka MMRF)

[The Rainmaker]

Hospitals switch to electronic records-BURLINGAME, CA

Very targeted technology spending is part of the Obama administration's stimulus package. And that could mean a new era of electronic medical records. But for some Bay Area hospitals, that process is already underway.

Hospitals are drowning in paperwork. Each of the 15,000 patients discharged by Burlingame's Mills Peninsula Hospital generates about 100 pages. That's 1.5 million pages per year.

So Mills Peninsula is in the process of jumping into electronic medical record keeping. It's training nurses and staff for a big change.

"There's too much data to be collected on the patient to simply keep it in your head anymore. We really need a peripheral brain if you will to help us manage and diagnose properly," said Chief Medical Information Officer Dr. Terry Fotre.

Dr. Fotre speaks from experience. He has 26 years specializing in emergency medicine.

Mills Peninsula is the beta site for more than two dozen California hospitals that are part of the Sutter Health System.

It joins many other hospitals spending billions of dollars to do now what President Obama wants done over the next five years. An overriding goal is to prevent errors and to provide instant access to patient records.