We are in the process of shopping for an EMR and Practice Management software. However, as I have played with the demo version, there are some things I certainly don't like, and was wondering how others handle the same issues.
First, a bit about my situation. I share an office with two other neurologists. Our practices are each sole proprietorships, but we share all overhead, including staffing, payroll, and our current (DOS-based) billing/scheduling software.
Here are the issues.
1 - Document and Prescription Headers. We must name a practice to register AC, and that practice name gets put on all headers. Obviously that really doesn't work for us as we want all our documents to reflect our registered business names, but we want to use the same EMR. I've requested/suggested to Jon that document header be editable, but in the meantime has anyone else dealt with this?
2 - Patient IDs. Is there a way to specify the starting number for Patient IDs? When I import all my old patients from my PM software there's no option to include patient/account #s. We want to keep our account numbers synced between the EMR and PM software, and it seems to me that we'll have to just use whatever AC assigns for new patients, but this seems less than ideal given we have a large number of existing patients who already have patient/account IDs. How have others dealt with this issue? (Hopefully it will be moot when the AC PM software is released next year.)
3 - Scheduling. Each of the three of us have different appointment schedules with appointments ranging from 10 to 45 minutes. In order to be able to schedule for all three providers, this means that the scheduler has to be set for 5 minute intervals, which is a PITA - too much scrolling just to see the whole day's appointments. When a patient is scheduled, a start time has to be selected by mouse click. Why can't there be a box where the appointment time can be directly edited/changed? After playing with many schedulers, I don't think there are any that can beat the EZClaim scheduler, and I'd love to see more of its features included in the scheduler for AC. As it is, we actually would likely continue to schedule with our old DOS based scheduler rather than change to AC's. Any tips or tricks to make the AC scheduler easier to deal with?
