A few personal observations on the 2016 ACUC, now that it is behind us. I would describe the ?feel? of the conference as ?just like old times?. The sense of a shared purpose and of camaraderie was everywhere, as it was in meetings in years past. We networked, re-connected with old friends and met new ones both between and during sessions. AC was represented by a sizable staff from all levels of the company, and to a person they were friendly and all-about helping and teaching. The meeting should end the worries of those with lingering concerns that the purchase by Pri-Med might end the personal, physician-friendly culture at Amazing Charts. Conference content was an excellent mix of sharing from experienced users and updates on what is new in the program and what is to come from the company. The ACUC fostered the sense of community that many of us value as an important added benefit of using the program.
A common expression heard this weekend was ?Wow, I didn?t know you could do that?. In fact, that was a major theme; the pleasant surprise of users as we recognized new ways that the program could help us to be more efficient and even provide better patient care. The company is discussing ways to spread the word about some of these features and ?tips and tricks?. I encourage people to post about them here.
V9 was previewed in detail by Chris Conrad, the head of product development. It is still not the ?official? release, but the links to download are available from support on request (and it will be official soon). Beta testers have been holding back, but now that they are free to speak, there seems to be a strong consensus that this is a stable, speedy version with a number of fixes as well as worthwhile improvements. The expectation is that one can upgrade from almost any version to 9 without any significant drop-off in performance, and in fact most people will find it to be faster (for some, significantly so). The V9 release notes clearly detail the changes, and as people become familiar with them I expect that we will be discussing them here.
If we want to continue doing things with V9 the same way we did them in V6-8, then that will work fine. On the other hand, I think the accumulated improvements will cause us to rethink some of our workflows as the EMR may now permit some more efficient ways of getting things done.
We owe a big thank you to John Squire, Charlie Schacter, Chris Conrad, and the rest of the team at AC who put this conference together and pulled it off so well. We have gone five years without a national ACUC, and it would have been easy for them to let us go longer...perhaps even indefinitely. They deserve credit for ?green-lighting? the conference, organizing and supporting it, and doing it right. Oh yeah... and the food was terrific.
