No PMs on this.
I suppose there are lumpers and splitters. I will have to be a lumper. I lean toward everyone staying together.
v5 has a higher learning curve because of four reasons:
1. ePrescribing (which is easy) it is only the codifying that makes it scary at first.
2. Immunizations. Pretty well done, but the migration is horrifying until you do it. If you are setting up from scratch no big deal. There are three windows, one of which is sandwiched between two others. This could have been simplified and, personally, I kind of want where I put in immunizations to be the same page I can see them.
3. Health Maintenance
4. Orders
I turned off HM on day one. Orders are going to be redone. I hope. I pretty much use the Other section with the free text and send everything to myself.
The other two with good manuals wouldn't be that bad. In fact, and don't make me do this, but I could write 2 two-page documents on them. Maybe change the word from codify to conversion.
What I am saying here is, right out of the box, it isn't that hard to use. Sure, I started with v1, and it was simpler. But, I still think it is like Word. Install it. Open it. Type. If you want to learn mail merge six months from now, great.
I'm telling you, while we taught the users stuff about AC, in general, they knew far more about v5 than we did, to a point.
One must keep things elegant. When you are forced to turn off drug allergies and interactions because if you don't, it's like Christmas in NYC, then it needs to be simplified. I think way too many times, AC buys or subscribes to a feature and then is happy with it. Sure, to be fair, they are working on New Crop and ePrescribe, but I simply would not be happy with the way the allergies and interactions are displayed. And, of course, we should be able to do allergies only. Other than actually sending it by ePrescribe, what good is the conversion process, uhh... codification process, if the interaction and allergy outcomes is horrible.
But, I will say, if I first installed AC and saw those orders, I would freak. I don't see what was wrong with the old ones. What has made AC much more difficult is CCHIT. Having to change a beautifully designed and streamlined program into a different mousetrap but not necessarily a better mousetrap, is a shame. It's just like the state of Florida mandating that you need to stamp a picture of yourself and the patient followed by smearing a drop of blood over the script before it is legal.
OK, so I did in one post what you talked about for an entire thread. I got a bit off topic even in this post.
I guess at the risk of being arrogant, I still don't think AC is that hard. Still, if you compare it with Logician or NextGen which take a staff of four and $10,000 to teach you, it's cake.
When I was learning Praxis 2.7 (which has a learning curve like the Mercury's orbit, part of the purchase was about 20 hours of training over the phone.
As each sale happens (and I don't know how quickly that happens), a support tech could spend 12 hours with the staff over the phone. Four hours on a Monday, let them play with it and use it on Tuesday, four hours on Wednesday to answer the questions that came up, user by him or herself on Thursday, and then four more hours on Friday. Just a thought.
