I'm sorry if I offended you on the CD burner comments. You are right. It is a horrible process. Which is why I don't use imported items.
I can generally burn a CD with a patient's records in less than five minutes, depending mainly on the time it takes to burn the record.
I also never send messages as there generally are comments in there that don't need to go with the chart. To be honest, I sent all progress notes, immunization record and what would be in Imported Items.
Prior to using my own program for all files not in AC, pretty much used the PDF theory. You have to commit to making sure that everything that goes in imported items is a pdf. So, a lab faxes in as a pdf. An x-ray faxes in as a pdf. All other faxes pdfs. If I print a letter from AC, I print it to pdf, and my staff would then import them. In this way, everything in imported items were PDFs.
At that point, I would then go to Pull Visit History and click on Progress Notes Only and then choose Print at the top right, I would then choose my Adobe print driver and "print" it to the imported items folder of that patient. So, if it were patient 1256, I would browse to the \\Server\Amazing Charts\Imported Items\1256 and print the progress notes to that folder. Now I have the 20 PDFs plus the progress notes. I then, unfortunately, would have to go to the summary sheet, find the immunization record, and print it to the same folder. Luckily, the path is remembered by Windows. Now, I have 22 PDFs. This process takes about 45 seconds.
Now, I am not sure about other PDF software and it is not that Adobe is necessarily better, it is just what I have. I then highlight the files, right click, select Combine supported files and then arrange them the way I want, which is generally Vaccine record, the PN then records and letters. I then choose Next, and the files are merged. This process takes about one minute. (literally). I then right click on the resulting merged file and select send to my CD burner and walk away. Five minutes later, it is done.
