Hi Grenville,
I'll see if I can be clearer about this... Our situation is that we are actually a very small part of a MUCH larger (over 900 partners) ED partnership. There are two offices in our area that I work out of. We are considered "ambulatory care centers" although what we do is a blend of urgent care and primary care (mostly the latter).
So, we don't have all of the autonomy that most FP/IM practices have, since we have to have things "cleared" by the compliance officer for our partnership, etc.
Our current registration system has been in place for a while. It is set up so that the two offices in our area are linked - so we can make appts. for pt's at one office from the computer at the other office.
So...I am trying to envision how we might use AC within the constraints of the above. Obviously, the easiest way is to redo the entire registration system for AC. That would entail installing AC at both offices. Not a huge issue, but we would have to have every doc at each office on board with AC, and we would have to go through the (bigger) issue of having it "approved" by the necessary people in the partnership.
On the other hand, if we were to ease our way into a "semi-EMR" system, we could (at least initially) retain our current registration system, and have one doc (that would prob. be me) begin to use AC to form pts. notes (which would then be placed into an existing paper chart) print out rxs, keep track of CQI, etc.
Or still yet, we could try it out solely for our occ. med pts. (about 20% of our total pts.) and utilize it to make much "neater" reports.
Part of figuring this all out boils down to these three issues:
1) How hard was it to change over your old registration system to the AC system?
2) What would I NOT be able to do with AC if I did NOT use the AC registration process and kept our own system in place?
3) How do the fees for AC apply when it is used by two separate offices? If I am a registered user, and work out of two offices, do I get charged twice the registration fee?
