Our hospital with 723 sickbeds takes care of acute diseases. The volume of documents was enormous, exceeding 3,500 titles each month. Paper work chronically puts too heavy a burden on physicians. Although an electronic system of storing medical records has been employed for years and about a half of documents are now processed electronically, there still remains a lot of paper work requiring hand writing.
  To lighten the work load of physicians, a type of computer software to make it easy to imput and output patients' medical history has become available recently. The features of the software are as follows:
(1) having about 600 formats,
(2) capable of inputting patients' personal information automatically,
(3) capable of retrieving disease names, dates of hospital admission and discharge, surgical procedures, etc. from the cemtra;computer system with electronic cards, and
(4) capable of outputting medical date and printing them.
  By dint of these functional capabilities, it has been made easy to issue the written opinions of physicians regarding the nursing care insurance and the medical certificate for life insurance money.
  With the revision of the schedule of medical service fees in April 2008, some points were given to physicians' desk jobs. Thanks to the new point system, we could assign five clerks to assist physicians with the paper work. They draw up documents and input non-medical data into the computer.
  The deployment of the clerical workers and the introduction of the computer software has shortened the time required for documentation by about 4 days from 11.2 days to 7.2 days. Responding to a questionnaire survey taken 6 months after the start of the new system, eight out of 10 doctors said that the strain on them was eased.