I understand a lot more after I took the time reading the thread instead of glancing in between patients and emailing frantically. I apparently did not get the 2 years in advance thing. At the time I purchased AC exactly a year ago I misunderstood that this was for tech support alone. I did not realize that eprescribe was part of that and not available as a stand alone product.
I also have appreciated AC for response to questions and access to the people operating it. So my choice, now that I am a bit more calm and understand it, is simply whether to pay $995/year for eprescribe or not. I am not sure I can justify this economically for a small subspecialty practice since I may write only 2-3 scripts a day at most.
Meaningful use is pretty hard to reach for us that don't have a general medical practice. Time spent to satisfy the requirements takes away from seeing the patient. I generally spend an hour with a new patient as a specialist in dizziness. Is their height relevant unless it is very high or very low?
But that is another discussion for another day. I try to avoid the "I walked to school in the snow" response when discussing things like resident hours.
