The conversion creates one PDF per patient. That PDF is named as such: lastname firstname - PatientID - Birthdate.pdf
Example: Summerlin James - 1006 - 12291970.pdf
This enables using Windows File Explorer to search for one file out of thousands. The files are in two parts. Part 1 is a report I made that contains all the database data. Demographics, insurance information, allergy list, problem list, SOAP notes, ROS, Assessment, Family History, and so on is all there. If you typed it in, it should be there. The second half is the imported items. All of them are converted to PDF if not already in that format and added to the report PDF. Yes, one patient's PDF can be hundreds of pages long depending on the patient and how many years you saw that patient.
Tomastoria is right, some doctors won't need all that stuff. Yes, they will spend several minutes looking for one thing. That is the one weakness of this approach. There is no way for me to know what doctor is going to want what as I am not clairvoyant. So, I have no choice but to extract everything. Secondly, we have to account for lawyer requests; therefore, we should extract everything.
For those of you who want to retire and maintain your own server for the next 7 - 10 years, that is certainly your choice. However, do note that I've already been on the phone with the crying 73 year old woman getting angry letters/phone calls from patients/doctors/lawyers demanding information that she doesn't know how to provide because her husband (the doctor) died 6 months earlier and she had no idea what to do. I've already been on the phone with the 76-year-old doctor who had retired 4 years earlier who needed me to fix his 9-year-old server that was really an old Windows 7 workstation that suddenly decided to give up the ghost and there were, again, patients/doctors/lawyers calling for information and he didn't know what to do (the server was unrecoverable and there were no backups).
These are NOT fun conversations to have.
I've already done my part. I've developed an easy and highly cost effective and fully automated conversion. Most of you will pay less than $1,000 and that includes FedEx shipping of the USB drive to and from me. For those of you retiring, the BEST thing you can do is call Andrew at
www.desertriversolutions.com and have him take full custodial ownership of your data after I convert it so you can retire in peace and not have to deal with this stuff. The second-best thing you can do is have me convert your data to a format (PDF) that is easy to maintain and doesn't require you to run Amazing Charts and be at the whims of their support when you stopped being a paying customer years ago should something go wrong. And you can easily copy the data to another device when the one it's on starts showing signs of wear and tear.
For those of you who want to continue to run your server for the next 7-10 years after you retire which could have you maintaining said server into your 80s with the hope that your server will just sit in your house and be happy for a decade AND that you won't die in the interim leaving your spouse totally screwed AND that you won't develop dementia or otherwise become mentally unable to keep things going AND should something go wrong with the server that someone will be there to save your butt assuming it can be saved........ go with God.
JamesNT
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