I pose this question only because for the last one year, only two providers in our office have been using AC. No staff had access to the AC computers as they were laptops we used when seeing patients. We were the only ones inputing things into AC.
Now we finally got half of our newer computers and hope to get the other half installed & running within the month (sooner than that hopefully). Our front office has adjusted well but that's a whole other post.
With my nursing staff, I have been for the last year printing my orders to our lab computer. Two copies were made, one to go with the specimen and the other for documentation (medicaid audits have asked to see requisitions before). We will soon have computers with AC in the back for the MA's & exam rooms and lab. I've read your posts over the last year and a half regarding ORDERS, reconciliation lacking etc.
My question is this: Will having years worth of orders that weren't reconciled going to slow the system down? I'm thinking that I can continue to print requitions to the lab. If the auditors want to look back at orders, instead of having a printed copy of the requisition we could pull up the orders section.
This way I could SAVE WITHOUT SENDING and keep the orders box fairly clean. But on the other hand if this is a database driven software, wouldn't it be to my advantage to SEND the orders? This way it would be recorded and codified? Or does SAVE WITHOUT SENDING codify the orders? Sorry but I don't know much about SQL or database stuff. Imagine at some future point upgrades will be done to the orders section and this information that was previously inputed could be useful?
We still have to reconcile our labs and I'm resigned to keeping our old handy archaic spiral binder that has the date of service, pt name & labs collected. Labs are highlighted as the results come in. Maybe someday there will be an easy solution to this.
Sorry for the long post
