Last week, President Obama proposed a progressive plan to computerize all medical records within five years. The plan was created to help create jobs and decrease costs in health care.

For NIU’s own Campus Health Services the move to electronic medical records has already been in progress and will begin implementation in March with hopes of having the system fully operational by May.

Karen Frazer, registered health information administrator and health information manager at the Campus Health Services said there is already a clinical software system that the workers use now to make appointments, including clinical coding to make orders, so the transition will be less jarring.

“There’s a lot of similarities in what they’ll be doing as far as making appointments and that sort of thing so it’s not like they’ve gone totally from a paper product to a computer product,” Frazer said.

The Campus Health Services currently has about 75,000 records on file and is not looking to convert them all to the electronic format since many of the records are inactive. As part of their 10-year retention policy, they keep all medical records for 10 years before sending them out to be shredded.

As students come in after May, they will begin to insert new records into the system.

Advantages of implementing an electronic medical records system include being environmentally friendly, providing easy access for all physicians to find a patient’s file, having less paper to move around and is much more legible than having to read someone else’s handwriting.

Jim Berryhill, the information technology coordinator for Campus Health Services helped start this project about a year and a half ago and has had experience in two implementations of electronic medical records. He believes that it will be the physicians who must be trained the most for the use of this system.

“The physicians are the ones who are going to be using [the system] more than anyone else and are going to have to be trained especially because as they see a patient they will document everything into the system,” Berryhill said.

One helpful feature of the new system, Berryhill pointed out, is that students will be able to book appointments online if they had to see a doctor as soon as possible.

While Obama’s plan might be progressive, Beverly Espe, registered nurse and assistant director of Campus Health Services was doubtful of the five-year plan for the rest of the country.

“As ideal as it may be, I think a five-year plan is very aggressive, and I don’t see it happening, unfortunately,” Espe said.