Hi all,
My wife is a solo FP in a practice we designed around being as affordable as possible (for patients, that is). To that end, I manage the "front desk" from home while my wife sees patients in a very small office space a few blocks from our home. The office includes a small waiting area and two exam rooms (with not so much as an additional closet). We like it that way but it has posed some tricky technological dilemmas. We both need access to the same incarnation of AC but we are necessarily operating from totally separate internet access points. This is truly a low budget operation (partly because we are committed to keeping costs low for our strictly self pay population and because it's a new practice and we're still in the pinching pennies stage of start-up) so the solution has to be cheap.
Our current method (which doesn't work) is to share a laptop. Yes, we share it. (c: I keep a printed copy of the schedule at home and call/text updates to her throughout the day. She takes care of faxes and portal messages between patients when she's got the computer and I clean up the loose ends when she's home. That was a great plan when she was only seeing a few patients per week and I had the laptop when she was at her other gig in a large group practice. Now she's working exclusively at her new practice 5d/wk and the faxes/messages are coming in way faster than she can keep up with alone and it's getting harder and harder to keep up with the phone calls etc when I don't have access to AC during business hours. We're not busy enough yet that everything has come to a screeching halt but I think we're quickly approaching that point.
My initial plan to initiate some semblance of simultaneous work flow is to set up a desktop (already own) as the main AC computer in the backup exam room at the office and buy an inexpensive laptop for the primary exam room. I'll access the desktop (with hidden/turned off screen) from home via GoToMyPC or some other similar service.
Should the office LAN be wired or wireless? The space is already wired for a LAN but that would keep my wife tied to the corner of her rather large primary exam room (12x15). I've heard that setting up an appropriately secure wireless network is a bear. (Can it really be that hard to securely network two PCs and a printer?) The laptop in the primary exam room would generally stay in that room but she does make house calls and I don't like the idea of having our main computer bouncing around town even though we have offsite backup. If she makes a house call on the way home, the office laptop would likely spend the night at our home and be returned to the office network the next day.
What hiccups or confounding circumstances does anyone foresee?
Is there a better way (within the constraints of our crazy business model)?
Any suggestions are much appreciated!!
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BTW, for those who are curious, every single patient has been enthusiastically supportive of the fact that, as often as not, I have to interrupt a phone encounter with a patient to tell my 4yo to hold his thought, play quieter, be nice to his sister (8mo), or fetch a paci to help keep her quiet. (c:
