As one of the folks who really wanted a PM module I must say although you are very correct in stating how hard it will be to get a fairly good one in place, the idea of having the AC of PM's I think is very attractive to many of us. If done correctly, so as to be easy to see, learn and use, much like AC the EMR is, what a wonderful thing that would be.
Many of us came to Jon and AC because of his; unique marketing style (Remember: Is AC a piece of Crap?) His wonderful price structure and licensing policy of "Per Provider" as opposed to all the other "wonderful" schemes all of you have mentioned in this post recently; and because of all of the above and the companies basic availiblity to talk and take suggestions, a sense of trust and that the average user mattered to Jon and AC.
Now recently there were some issues and growing pains to be sure, but still the concept of one integrated program run by a company most of us already like our relationship with, seems pretty appealing. Now some of us, ourselves included probably need to see some fence mending, and I for one am hopeful that this can still be achieved it boths sides truely want it and are willing to work at it, but I would still love to see it come to fruition.
I would like to see it have the ability for us to use with a small private contracted biller, as this is really my main objective in the long run. To have an off-site biller log in securely, building in my database and doing our work, all while still allowing us here at the office to enter some basics like what we did collect at time of service be it a copay, a deductable or what we call a PIFATOS for those who "pay in full at time of service".
The problem with building bridges and interfaces is between OS, and two to three vendors constantly updating and de-bugging their side of things is this inerfaces just seem to always be going thru issues of compatability and working well together. So I feel in the long run, although the PM may be a work in progress, it will be worthwhile to Jon, AC and most importantly most of us.
I'll close with this. I had a bit of an issue a while back over one of the PM features we already have not working correctly and crunching the numbers wrong. But our being upset with this was not really a blackeye on Jon or AC, it was that we had grown quite attached to this feature as a means of keeping an eye on how things were doing here in terms of certain numbers, because we do outsource our billing and AC was promoted as having a certain amount of PM in it already. There are even articles on the AC website today where it speaks to these features.
And so we were disappointed that it was not working properly and that we couldn't really count on it as we had been doing. How that all went down was a mess to be sure, but really we were just users who liked what we had because of our situation and simply wanted a feature to work that we had grown to like and depend on. Most of you are familiar with when you log on to see financial data in the Admin section, the disclaimer pops up. The features contained in that section are the ones we really liked. But as of right now, they don't work right, AC does not support them or promise that they will work correctly, and there is this disclaimer.
So even if you outsource most of your billing, wouldn't it still be nice for the doc and/or the practice manager to still have a decent amount of data based on their practice and patients to help them mind the store? of course it would be. For us personally, it certainly is. I can't wait, but I am concerned as to what it will look like and what it will or won't be able to do or provide us with. And not to open old wounds, but if we are to trust this thing with the life blood of our practice, our cash flow and the like, just what kind of rights and protections will we have from our "new" EULA???
In the end, it just goes round and round. We can not discuss the one without the other....
