The concept of a cloud version is appealing to me; I have one question / problem, which relates to very large imported items and how quickly they would load.
Before I started using AC about a year ago, I had my own sort of EMR, which was basically one PDF file per patient, with all notes, reports etc in it, and with bookmarks that allowed for easy navigation.
I have kept the original PDF for each patient in AC, and whenever I scan a report or anything else, I put it into that single PDF (using Acrobat), and maintain the bookmark structure. I do the same for new patients. It makes for very easy navigation, and I end up with just one imported item per patient, the patient PDF file. I much prefer this approach to having a ton of imported files, both because of easy navigation within the file and because it gives me a single file that can be sent if I need to forward the chart to someone.
These PDF files can get very large, often in the 10's of MBs, sometimes 100 MB or more. Opening these big PDF's on my office network has never been a problem, whether they are opened on the main server computer or on another computer on the network. Opening speed has always been fine. But what will happen if these files are on the cloud? Will they be locally cached, somehow, or will the entire file have to be transferred via the Internet each time? If so, there could be major speed issues.
Any thoughts?
Michael Jacobson
New York
