After a decade in which every second electronic medical record implementation seemed to go poorly and clinicians were becoming increasingly resistant to their somewhat dubious charms, the implementation of the Epic EMR at Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne last year was more closely scrutinised than most.

Taking a big bang approach and in effect moving from paper to digital overnight could have been a disaster, but by all accounts it has gone off with few if any hitches. Now that it has been in place for over a year, some of the promised benefits of going paperless can be measured and they too are looking pretty good.

RCH's chief medical information officer and consultant paediatrician Mike South was a champion of going digital and has been a driving force behind the hospital's equally successful roll-out of a patient portal. But while achieving EMRAM Stage 6 certification for both the hospital's inpatient and outpatient services was a welcome achievement, it is the measurable benefits in terms of quality of care and patient safety that Professor South finds most pleasing.