Thanks everyone for their help.
I do use primopdf (love it) but found it a bit too lengthy/cumbersome of a process to make a pdf file to fax. My office staff mainly do these things and if it takes more than 30 seconds or 5 steps something is likely to get messed up whenever a pc is involved.
I do have a copy of adobe 7 standard that I got along with a fujitsu scanner. I tried bert's approach and it works well.
I also have office professional and it is easy to use, but I agree that opening it up on the other end may cause a problem.
I mainly want to stick with pdf files since that seems to be the most ubiquitous in electronic interoffice communication and also allows security to be applied if needed.
I tried both ways that Bert described and noticed that when the html file was converted to pdf in adobe a lot of them seemed "out of sync" so a page would start on half of one page and end on another. I did not see this problem when printing to the adobe pdf driver.
I figure that I will print out the instructions and give them to my office staff for reference.
I also started using updox to more efficiently file away the labs/incoming documents from the fax server. This has worked well so far and there is also a solution to this problem (similar to Bert's solution).
Scott Clemensen has this solution in updox:
This is a great topic and I have experimented around with multiple ways of doing it. I think I have the answer for specific situations:
-With pt name highlighted in main AC window, first note the patient's ID number (you will see why later) and without opening patients chart, right click on the name and select "print entire chart"
-Provide info on who you are releasing records to (insurance company)
-In next box, select "entire chart summary" and "entire chart detail"...DO NOT select "imported items" DO NOT select PRINT, or the pages will be sent to your default printer. Select "Preview"
-From the printing Preview, select the printer icon in the upper left hand corner, and select the Apractis-UpDox printer from the list of printers. You will have to do this twice, once for the face sheet and demographics, and once for the progress note detail.
-Now load the documents into the UpDox workspace from the Interface menu
- Right click and select all documents
-Assign the patinet's name to the documents as if you were filing a single lab for the patinets
-File the combined PDF (progress notes and demographics) in the patient's chart under the "other" heading as "progress notes and demographics" or something similar.
You have now just placed all of the patients AC progress notes in the patient's imported items folder. By remembering the patient's ID, you can now access the Imported items folder in the Amazing Charts program files: Inside the imported items folder there is a separate folder for each patient numbered sequentially by their chart ID number. You simply find the patient's ID folder, double click it, and you should see all of the patient's imported PDF's including one entitled progress notes and demographics.
-You can now burn this folder to a CD ROM or combine the contents of the folder into a huge PDF that can then be faxed to an insurance companies toll free fax number using a hard wired fax line and computer.
Again thanks to everybody for their great input.
