I've posted this as a comment in a recent topic, but I'm going to post it on its own and see if anyone thinks this may be an idea . . .


Perhaps Amazing Charts can do what our government would love to do - ask AC users if they would voluntarily contribute a one time extra donation/payment (according to their individula comfort level) with that donation specifically directed towards a requested improvement.

Jon has stated privately that the biggest impediment toward implementing new improvments (eg letter writer, interventions sections etc) is the lack of manpower and financial resources of his company.

Bert already has documentation of the most user-wanted changes. If Jon could provide an estimate their implementation costs, I wonder if we could organize some type of ? Amazing-Charts-A-thon? (think NPR or MDA) where users could donate specifically to reach a goal to implement one of the improvement of their choice. For example, Say, , the cost of hiring a programmer to institiute a word-compatible letter writer is $10,000. or the cost of a non-overdocumented allergies section may be $2000, or a modifiable "imported items" section is $5,000. Those goals could be posted with users making one time contributions to reach that goal. Without any one individual enduring financial hardship, we could donate to reach our goal of any one of a numbe of specific target improvemnt goals. (AC is already very reasonably priced, thousands of dollars less than other systems, and users might be willing to pitch in, particularly as the changes benefit users both convenience and efficiency/bottom-line).

Thoughts??




Idea #2.: Perhaps Jon may be willing to let some of the users actually do the heavy-lifting and write in some of the code for improvement into the program ourselves? I have the sense a number of users are programming-savvy and might be willing to write the actual code for some of the desired improvements, which could then be submitted to the AC programming staff for review, tweaking and implementation . (I'd volunteer, but I don' know how to write code).

Any thoughts? . . .Anyway, just an idea for trying to accelerate change.


Bruce Morgenstern (Neurology)
Denver, CO