I really think that never established patients are unto themselves and need to be tracked separately. They are not patients that once where and now are no more... They never were. But yet in today's legal and business climate they can still come back to haunt us. Why not a third button for entered but not yet established? When they finally arrive, you hit established and "boom' they are in.
Furthermore, I don't want 500 extra chart numbers that never where out of a few thousand. I think if possible there should be Temp123 chart numbers and then AC123 type chart numbers for the real and inactive patients. So someone is TEMP123 as you enter them and make them an appointment or just take their info. When they finally establish you hit the est button, now AC takes them from the TEMP side and properly assigns them the next in proper sequence chart number. And perhaps even keeps their original temp # and the date that they first got entered. These are all things that can and do come up and that is what a database is for. To track all this garbage for us so we can document it just in case it comes back up someday....Right????
And again. I can make a record on paper for my kids or my mother in law and the like. Most programs come with false patients to play with, show off the program and the like. Doesn't AC want us to "show them off" to non-covered people who none the less might help spread the word? "Hey I saw this neat, well thought out, inexpensive ERM at Dr Smith's office yesterday" This really is a common feature in a number of other EMR's and it really makes life easier in many ways. Want to see how a new feature works, play with "drawing" where a cyst is on a limb, importing items, running tests. We always do it first in James Bond before we did it the first time in a real patient's chart. It just make common sense...Give people a place to track these difficult patients and a place to play and learn.
