I've never used the letter writer, so not sure what the advantage would be anyway. I just open Word, type a letter, make it .pdf, FAX it, and import into AC. It's very fast that way.
For specialists, the letter writer is actually one of the most important parts of an EMR. In fact, a good letter writer can save a specialist thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of extra work each year by automatically generating a properly addressed and formatted letter from the clinic visit note. A well designed letter writer allows the physician to click a single button and then automatically draws any desired sections of the visit note + any additional templated text into a letter, with the referring physician's name and address already filled in. Compare that one click solution versus the arcane cutting and pasting into Word that we have to do now in order to create a professional-looking consult letter from the Amazing Charts note. When you multiply the extra few minutes it takes to create the letter by the number of consults seen by a specialist daily, it adds up quickly. It's the difference between going home on time or having the time to actually eat lunch versus getting home late (again) or having just 5 minutes to quickly eat a sandwich before starting clinic back up again in the afternoon. I realize the letter writer might not matter to some GPs, but hopefully Jon can understand why it's so important to many of his other customers.
Unlike chart notes, which cannot be edited after signing for medicolegal reasons, the letter writer actually needs to produce easily editable text if it is to be of any use to physicians who routinely send out consult reports.
