Cleaning House and Past Medical History

Moving to EMR is like moving to a new home-- it's a big change and can be painful at worst, and a lot of work at best. But it also gives you a great opportunity to clean house, I mean really clean house, because who wants to move all the junk you never use, right?
So, when you are entering in Past Medical, Family and Social History, I recommend that you clean house from your old chart. Chances are I really won't need to know birth weight on a 13 year old. There's a lot of stuff on my old problem list that won't be relevant anymore. Instead of taking charts home and working for two hours each night to get all the details in, just pick the most important history items and enter them in during or after the visit as needed. (See my previous post about entering diagnoses through using a quick note for another way to do this.)
I'm not suggesting that EMR is like a shiny new house, but it's at least a lot less cluttered than a tattered old paper chart...