Indy,
I agree that the AC management has had us go through a multi-year misadventure. The goal, though, was good.
I disagree that they should work on interoperability. Why? Because it's very hard to do. We know where that leads; another misadventure.
What AC did wrong was to try to re-invent PM. All they had to do was add a normal billing program, and we would have been good a year ago. A good program to emulate as far as billing goes is AltaPoint. Each bill is a separate bill, unlike Medisoft. If a patient's insurance changes, the old is still in the bill you generated so that you can see if that was the problem. You enter all necessary info for that bill right on that bill (referring physician, other place of service such as nursing home, hospital, etc...). If you are doing CLIA labs, you specify the referring physician (yourself), and then the POS (your office). The CLIA info is entered into the claim.
You open up a patient's file, and you can go into a ledger only on that patient. You can see which claims have a balance. Click and the claim opens up to show charges and payments.
If full PM means being able to track each box of needles we buy, then I really don't need that much detail (Altapoint allows that tracking too).
What we really need is claims management. We need better integration between rolodex and claims. We need the program to bill properly.
What we don't need is the headache that comes with each "bug fix" version of one program not working properly with another, and each vendor blaming the other. We also don't need AC to try to do everything at once in the billing section. They wanted to automate everything with Gateway, but couldn't. Now they have backed off, but we don't know how far.
