Wow!! Thanks for all the comments and advice.

First of all, I take no offense. I'm not exactly a newbie -- but I'm not really very sophisticated, either. I'm sorry if I am being annoyingly indecisive.

I started using medical office computers with an Apple IIe in 1980 -- had to hack the Applesoft program to make it work in our office. (The hard drive was as big as the IIe, and it was 4 MB! Made by Corvus, wonder whatever became of them?)

Since then, I have tried to keep up but advanced networking and domains and all the rest is beyond me (even Win7 throws me sometimes) -- and there are only so many hours in a day which have to be shared with other interests. Also, to add to the challenge, my wife who is my medical partner as well, is dead set against allowing EMR into her life, so we run a hybrid paper/EMR scheme. She is also extremely jealous of the time I devote to the EMR -- sometimes I think a real flesh-and-blood affair would be better tolerated.

This, and my natural inclination to keep things simple (isn't that partly why we all use AmazingCharts?) leads me to spend a lot of time evaluating possible new setups before I actually go for them. I'm sorry if Bert and Sandeep are annoyed by indecisiveness and frequent questioning. I try not to ask the same question more than once -- but I find with computer and network setup, what seems the simplest thing can be a major sticking point. For example, after long frustration with inability to track down what seemed to be a bug preventing transmission of certain prescriptions, I finally discovered that one of the receptionists was entering the address "Lewis and Clark Road" as "Lewis & Clark Road" -- and the ERx program simply stopped because of the ampersand. There are so many little things like that. I'm not going to embark on a major system revamp without a lot of thought and preparation.

I think I will eventually get to the server setup, but it looks like a bigger deal than I first thought -- even with Essentials, which seems to be relatively more forgiving. Actually, Sandeep, I haven't installed the Essentials program anywhere yet. I downloaded and burned the ISO and checked to make sure it would boot. I haven't got even to the point of loading it on a machine yet. Your suggestion to put it in a virtual machine is helpful -- but of course, since I have only ever used VirtualBox (which I don't think would work for this) I would have to learn another program in VMWare.

Even after all these years, I find medicine pretty challenging -- the electronics can be a major distraction, frequently adding to, rather than reducing frustration.

Tom Duncan


Tom Duncan
Family Practice
Astoria OR