Remember many moons ago when someone predicted that computers would create the “paperless office”? Well, I’d like to dig him up, bring him back to life, and invite him to my hospital.
So far this year, our scanning department has scanned and indexed over 1.4 million documents!
We were under a deadline to get all un-indexed documents indexed by the end of Wednesday. I was asked to help since I had done it before and was pretty good at it. If I had to do that everyday, I’d be in the looney bin by now.
Supposedly, in the not too distant future, we’ll go to a system that allows patients to read and sign documents electronically and that form will be sent directly into their file. The only time the form will exist in a tangible form is to make a copy for the patient’s personal use.
Right now, we do it all by hand!
A patient who just walks in the door can generate the following documents:
Admission form
Privacy law acknowledgement
Outside contractor release form
Driver’s license or ID card
Insurance card
Insurance verification
Physician’s orders
Pre-cert information
Insurance benefits release form
Receipt for co-pays
…and so forth.
I think computers have actually generated MORE paperwork.
Um, yeah. Check out my locale and laugh. All computers have done for those of us in Academia around here is make us have to do everything twice. Once electronically and again as hard copy, “just in case”. Syllabi, Purchase orders, Registration forms, all of it. Please, just let me do one or the other but not, BOTH. That’s just dumb as a box of rocks.
Hmmmm… must be a Slo-vannah thing.
The division I work for is not only going paperless (HA!) but switching to VoIP all within the next six months.
The welfare division has already switched over to 75% paperless and supposedly it’s great. We have access to their electronic files and, well, it’s decent. BUT they don’t generate as much dead tree as we do. You think judges are going to magically switch over to electronic court orders? Hell, some of them probably remember chiseling orders into tablets. So far the “Electronic Committee” has set up each case with 18 separate folders. Eighteen. So, rather than just flipping through a physical file for a minute to find information, we’ll have to delve through eighteen frickin’ folders to find it. Granted, should it be imaged correctly it may not be a problem, but we’re the government. Things done right? I laugh.
In an average day I receive well over 70 pieces of mail. Some just get filed, but the majority have to be worked. It hasn’t been made quite clear just HOW we will receive the mail. E-mail notification? Ugh. We use Lotus Notes which bites already. What will happen when we crash (and we crash often)? No one knows yet.
We’re trying to go to GMP with a couple of the main assays that we use at work. I’m starting to feel that simply setting foot in the lab wipes entire forests off the face of the earth, and given one or two more big experiments the entire planet will be nothing but a barren wasteland devoid of trees.
On top of that, through the sheer repetition of GMP paperwork I’ve caught myself starting to initial and date items that I’ve crossed off my grocery list!
Dear Employee,
You are receiving this email so that we may verify that you received in the mail a copy of the brochure describing the Company’s commitment to a paperless office. Click on this link to verify electronically that you received the brochure. To log on to the site, you will need your LambaThrust password. If you cannot find the yellow sticky that you wrote your LambaThrust password on, please go to this site to request a new password. Should you have further questions about the Company’s commitment to a paperless office, please refer to the posters which have been posted every five feet throughout the building.
Thank you for helping to make the paperless office a reality here at Big Corporation.
Sincerely,
Overpaid Toady
Vice President
Divison of Non-renewable Resources
Am I the only one seeing something funny (and schoolboyishly obvious) in this thread title?
But yeah, the “paperless office” has long been proven to be a myth. One of those predictions like airliners with nothing but a joystick on the cockpit, or hovercars by 1980.
I like when my company distributes brochures and fliers bragging on how they’re saving $x,xxx,xxx.xx per fiscal year by reducing the amount of wasted paper.
I’ll only believe in a paperless office when they upgrade our computers with new models, and take out all the printers on the floor at the same time without replacing them.
Instead, we get new printers more regularly than new computers, because the printers tend to wear out first.
I once worked for a company that required every e-mail be printed out and filed, and every e-mailed work order had to be printed and filed in at least two departments. One could not accomplish anything by a phone call without e-mail confirmation, which then had to be printed and filed.
So a client would call me and say, “Hey, do this and that for me, ok?”
I would say, “Sure. Just e-mail me that request.”
Client would say, “Er, why? I just asked you to do the same damn thing you’ve done every week for the last two years, but this week I need it on Tuesday instead of Wednesday.”
I would say, “Client, our company policy is that I cannot do anything without an e-mail.”
Client would argue, grumble, bitch, threaten to take his business elsewhere, and grudgingly send me an e-mail saying “Please do what I asked you on the damn phone.”
But then I had an e-mail to print and file, so I could do what the client wanted.
Then the company had to hire two file clerks to handle the filing of thousands of e-mail printouts. Served ‘em right. I hope they go out of business.
Tell me about it. This week alone, I’ve printed out close to 200 pages worth of stuff that wound up going in the trash a short time later.
Yeah, they were all news articles on various NFL training camp activities and pre-season reports that I use to make myself look busy at work, but still…
We have the old ‘send me an email’ business, too, for good reason.
Often people would ring up and ask for us to do something. We would do it for them. Then, whatever it was they asked for would screw up down the track. We would go to the person who would say, “but that’s not what I asked for!”
Ok, so now nothing gets done without an email, so there’s no arguments about what was asked for, by whom, and why.
This is just minor stuff, and of course, we should be using a change management system for it, but too many fingers in the pie and the change management system is too cumbersome to use for a simple change, so it becomes a change discouragement system.
And, of course, we have our colleagues from India, some of whom have accents too thick to interpret, but write better english than I do.
On the other hand, in the 20-person software firm I’m associated with we use about one ream of paper per month. Everything is electronic. The only paper we deal with is bills that come in the snail-mail, and even the outgoing checks are almost all electronic.
It can be done. Certainly it helps that our customers are all businesses and our products are themsleves computerized.
As it happens, I’m currently working on software that will allow hospitals to be almost entirely paperless. You know what the big challenge is? It’s not the technical aspects. Digital signatures, security, connectivity - all that is easy. The big trick is getting people to use the fookin’ computers and not insist on priting everything out.
Yeah, about six months worth of work. We’re trying to go paperless but we can’t unless the customers stop sending us paper and start using the fax (our fax number goes directly into our computer system) or the Internet instead. Internet submissions take precedent over fax submissions and both take precedent over paper.
In 1982 the place of my current employment circulated a memo that stated “In the very near future CompanyName will be installing a computer system that will eliminate the need for paper documents…” I didn’t work there at the time. Fast forward 8 years. The area where I work has 14 full time employees to handle the paper documents! there are nine computers in the department two terminals connected to an AS400 and 7 Macs. There’s a table in the center with 40+ log books that are filled with printed excel spreadsheets where you manually write the record number and where the document went, these logs are duplicated at various points on within the company. The AS400 was used strictly for timecards and the Macs for email and printing new pages for the log (and games of course).
Today we are still distributing paper to the manufacturing floor but everyone else uses electronic copies there are now three people in that department and they do more jobs! I played a key role as part of the team that put 15 people plus several huge copy machines(with staff) out of work. In the last 6 years the code I wrote saved the company 4.5 million dollars.
