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With 22 ORs and a busy caseload, our academic medical center was no stranger to computers in clinical practice. The University of Kansas Hospital had the bare bones applications: systems and software for scheduling, preference cards and billing. But we wanted our computers to lend a hand in benchmarking, too. Tracking patient care, surgical outcomes and patient safety through retrospective reviews of paper charts was time consuming and hardly an efficient use of staff. We wanted the advantages that electronic medical records offered. Our medical records renovation went surprisingly smoothly, and yours can, too.
