Why use an EMR for you medical practice?  

For one, you don't have to deal with storing all those paper records. A lot of them are probably fading by now and you can't even recognize your writing in some of them. Oh, and all that paper plus file cabinets? Your clinic space is important, don't lose the battle to paper.  

In your next clinic schedule, try to keep track of what you do in the clinic and the types of patients you see. You'll notice that you actually write the same prescriptions (and notes) over and over again. How much time do you spend daily, weekly, monthly doing those?  

Why do that when you can spend 5 seconds to create that and print it out?  

How about lost records? Come on, you lost records before, right? You kept looking and looking only to realize that it's not there, maybe it got lost or it's in your other clinic. That's inefficiency right there.  

So much of your consultation time with the patient is actually wasted.  

Why waste your precious time and your patient's time, when you can spend that time to actually care for the patient? Shouldn't it have been like that to begin with?

Of course, there are also other areas of your practice that you might want to be able to improve upon as well. 

How about tracking billing? Inventory? How much does the HMO's owe you? Do you know how your practice is actually doing financially? Maybe you want to see reports or trends about your patients for your personal research? 

Good luck doing all that with paper but those are all easily done with an EMR.