Ac's simple SaaSy version of itself I suspect will be attractive to end users who want functionality without infrastucture headaches... those with multiple sites...and those burdened with excessive overhead.
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Liberating technologies help small businesses. Imagine having off site schedulers ... to extend hours available for pt to schedule and free up day time staff for other tasks - off site document management - all your updox faxes neatly tucked into the chart with flags waiting for you at the beginning of the day - night call or holiday coverage leaving messages attached to patient records - centralized backoffice services for AC users is a simple set up for groups in the cloud.
If security, data ownership, performance and price are "Amazing" I would give it a try.
We've been providing "AC in the Cloud" for seven months now, and I have Gino to thank for provoking the thought during dinner @ ACUC 2010. The technology then was more enterprise focused, and had not matured to where it is now, so there were several things to overcome, and the most challenging has been getting the pricing to scale to what our advisory group of Doctors see as the key element.
Gino, JBS, and others encouraged me to talk to folks about the possibilities at ACUC 2011, and JB was kind enough to ask me to spend some time with him and another Doc to talk through how it could be done.
Lori and I so enjoy the folks that we have met through the AC user community, we chose to invest the time and capital in June of last year to implement AC in the cloud. We demonstrated the platform to JB and some of the AC folks a few weeks later, and went into production in July of last year.
One of our inspirations was a Doc that wanted to use AC across both her private practice, and patients she saw in a clinic setting. Using our hosted platform and Updox, the practice is consolidating document flow, multiple fax numbers, and giving her peace-of-mind.
In July we did a group demo for some of the Doctors on the board who had expressed interest, and that volunteer focus group input drove our next generation implementation.
We have learned lots of tricks and twists along the way, and that is why we 'soft-rolled' the offering. We now know which lab apps will lock up a 64bit machine, some of the interesting things that AC can do after server patching, and several other tidbits you gather along the way.
It sounds like JB and AC are focused on a different offering in the marketplace, and we welcome them.
I love finding elegant solutions, and based on another user request, we will be offering a disaster recovery solution soon so that you can fail-over to the 'cloud', keep your practice running, and eventually have your AC server restored to your hardware, or even replacement hardware shipped to you.
A cloud solution is not a good fit for everyone, but it is advantageous for certain practices, groups, and circumstances.
