Electronic Medical Records--a Perspective: How Long Does It Take to Read a 243-Page EMR‪?‬

Medical Records in Our Office For the past 20 years, our pulmonary office has used what I consider to be a simple digital or computerized medical record--an electronic medical record (EMR). By the late 1980s, my associates and I had seen about 29,000 pulmonary consultations. We used a numeric filing system in which the first number would tell us whether the consult originated in the hospital, in our office, or as a referral. We used a card file to access patient records. We didn't see this as unusual since, when we went across the street to the hospital, we used their card file to find the hospital number in order to pull the patient record.