Brian,
Excellent idea. May I please give you some food for thought as well as I hope Jon and his team see these and think about them. As we see it here at Village Medical, so many of the things that happen in AC are forced to go thru the doctor herself, and she becomes the main bottleneck as we staff wait for her to send us the Rx's, letters and all the rest.
Like in a paper office what we need is a way for the staff create the basic template of the letter, the refill or what have you, so as long as the doc is OK with it, then all she has to do, is sign her name at the bottom. Or in a real paper enviornment she would send it back with corrections on it for the typist, were as in AC allowing her to simply change a few words or templates here and there because it has not be "saved" yet until the doc signs off on it, it might be able to work that way.
So let's say a patient calls looking for a refill, the MA takes the message and creates the basic Rx in AC, So then the doc gets this prepared Rx along with a message in her in box, she likes it checks off on it, she wants to change the dose, the quantity or the number of refills she can do that too. If she cares to she can flush the whole idea, and send a relpy to the correct staff member (perhaps not the one who sent it either, choice would be nice here too, via drop down to forward or reply I guess) that she wants the patient to come in for a visit first, or a note with orders to stop taking it, here is an Rx for something else. I think you can see where I am going here.
AC requires the doc herself to start and create almost all the paperwork herself that must have her name or signature on it, as opposed to allowing the staff to take some of the initial creation of this work off her hands to assist her, so she can spend more time, being the doctor. This was a suggestion I put up a long time ago, heard one or two things that it was going to be looked into and then it just never seemed to go anywhere. I think even Jon thought is was worth looking at and trying to do something with at one point.
But to sum it up in a nutshell, we still see our doctore herself as one of the largest bottlenecks here at our office. Anything that can be done that would allow us staff members to assist her with all of this would be very helpful and apperciated.... Including getting rid of the midplaced entery of notes and orders when one has a different chart open when one tries to simply handle a quick clerical chore. I think it is one of the things that has Nancy not attending to some of these "knock 'em out now and be done with them" type items too. Thanks much...
Paul
