Day #1 with ACPM:
I thought I would share our experience getting started with PM and use this thread to invite others to do so.
Last night the AC tech staff turned on the Practice Management module and did the data migration from AC into PM. It took about an hour. We use AC in the Cloud so I didn't have to be hovering around my computers at the office during the change over--I was home having dinner.
Today was our first day using PM and thought I would share our experience. Despite the training that AC provided prior to today, we all felt a bit overwhelmed. The reality of running PM is quite a bit different from what I imagined--like most things in life, I suppose. We thought we would be able to enter charges starting with day #1 but realized we're not ready for that yet. We thought we would start using the appointment scheduler in PM today (PM has a new and improved appointment scheduling module) but realized it wasn't as simple as we thought and put that on hold. All the appointments in AC have to be manually re-entered into PM. The data transfer does not include appointments--apparently the two programs are not fully compatible. We are going to continue scheduling appointments in AC for now.
The main surprise is the fact that AC and PM are not as well integrated as I had hoped. For example, some of the demographic data (name, address, phone) transfers back and forth from AC to PM but other data does not. You have to enter the Language Preference, Race, Ethnicity in AC or it doesn't count for MU. The insurance info has to be entered in PM. So about all we really accomplished today was to start entering insurance info on patients into PM.
The nuts and bolts reality of transitioning from our current billing program (Medisoft) to PM is more complicated that we realized. The main reason is that the data transfer process does not include extracting data from our current billing program and transferring to PM--so we are starting from scratch. What will we do with all our accounts receivable that were entered into our old system? This and a variety of others questions remain to be answered. For now we are going to continue to use Medisoft until we get going with PM.
The good news is--none of my staff quit. I got home at a reasonable hour and am only mildly aggravated. :-) The tech support staff were very helpful and spent a lot of time on the phone with us today. I'm sure in time it will all work out--but it's going to be a lot of work getting everything up and running. Fortunately we are prepared to have very little money coming in for a while during this transition.
