Going digital: replacing paper with electronic records is helping the Healthcare industry improve patient care, but saving money and making the best medical use of new systems will take time, providers say.

• Author: Marshall, Lisa
• Position: DIGITAL [medicine]

It was just before 9 a.m. on a Thursday at The Children's Hospital in Aurora, and Chih Chi Sun was in no mood to fill out paperwork.

She'd been up all night with a feverish 1-year-old, nursing what she and her pediatrician at Kaiser Permanente had thought was a nasty ear infection. By morning, young Zach Kuo, a premature twin with a history of medical problems, was vomiting blood. As his mother rushed through the sliding doors into Children's bustling emergency department--her lethargic boy in her arms - she almost expected to be met with the standard barrage of questions.

What are his allergies? What medications is he on? When was the last time he saw his doctor? But instead, she simply handed over Zach's Kaiser identification card and took a seat as his complete medical history uploaded on a computer screen for the ER doctors who would care for him.

"The woman behind the counter just asked me his birthday and last name, and put this name tag on his wrist," said Sun, rocking her son in an exam room as the X-rays and lab tests he had that morning made their way to his physician's laptop around the corner. "It was pretty simple."

In 2007, The Children's Hospital became the first free-standing pediatric hospital in the nation to replace its tattered paper files and bulky radiology films with electronic medical records to be shared among its own emergency room doctors, pediatricians and specialists. Three years later, it has moved an important step further, joining forces with Kaiser Permanente of Colorado's physician group, Exempla Healthcare, and a handful of pediatrician offices in an ambitious health information exchange network that allows for the sharing of records between facilities.

This effort and that of the nonprofit Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (COHRIO) - which hopes to create a statewide digital health information exchange within five years - have put Colorado on the map as an epicenter of innovation in the burgeoning field. But as the Obama Administration rolls out billions in incentives to prompt doctors to go digital (and warns that if they don't, there will be penalties to come in 2015) two critical questions are top-of-mind among many in the health-care field.

Do electronic medical records save money? And do they improve patient care? The answer depends on whom you ask.

A LONG WAY TO GO

According to an August 2010 report in Health Affairs, just 11.9 percent of hospitals have adopted electronic medical...