Home Forums Discussions General Discussion My Paperport Document

I always love when the ED pages me and they say, "Who paged you and who was it about?" Uhhh....you are the one who paged me. And, I think you wanted the hospitalist, didn't you?

Now, I know there are some specialists on here. It would be interesting to hear their perspective. I am sure they get a few referrals where all it says is here is my patient. I have no idea what is wrong with him or her.

Plus the specialists on AC are probably a different breed by definition.

Bert,

Just got back from the coffee pot.... wish I didn't have a couple of hours of paperwork to do, cuz a nice "irish coffee" would work lovely now.... oh well.

Question for the group, how can I expeditiously fax replies back to pharmacies and the like from paperport.
I have signed,and renamed files of patient info. I can import to AC just fine. What is the most efficient way for my staff to fax the items back... paperlessly...

Just an aside, I understand completely the woes of primary care and specialty care. I am a D.O. who practiced IM for 5 years before choosing to go back to get specialty training in pulmonary and critical care. I now work in Central Ohio, and underserved area of Appalachia doing both IM and Pulm. My favorite pet peeve as either a specialist or an IM is when my patient shows up for a routine OV with the slip for his preop clearance for his elective knee replacement. The patient says something like, "the doctor told me I could just have you complete this at my next visit.... oh by the way, surgery is tomorrow". Now, no offense to any surgical types, but you folks are a different breed altogether. Here sits the reformed 12 pack a day brewski habit with the 2 pack a day marloro habit, with an illness in nearly every organ system, and I am supposed tp be Cinderella and wave my magic wand and make this ok for surgery? What were you thinking????? or should I say were you thinking???? So I end up playing bad "guy" cancelling surgery cuz there needs to be a stress, cxr, pft etc... and did I mention this patient is the last one of the day, and central scheduling at the hospital closed 30 minutes before Ifinished office.

Now I think I'll take my Glenlivet straight...

God, I guess this could be endless. I have the same pet peeve, except it is pretty much the opposite. The oral surgeon or ENT sends a perfectly healthy eight year old for a pre-op physical a month before the surgery. Like the kid can't have pneumonia a month later. And, why can't they do the pre-op. If the kid comes to the surgery wheezing, are they going to go by my note?

I also love it when the dentist calls wanting me to tell them if patient X can needs SBE. The reason: the patient told him or her he had a murmur. Well one thing I learned on rotation in my residency with the pediatric cardiologist is that EVERY child has a murmur. It's impossible not to have one to some degree. Why can't they prescribe the amoxicillin?

I think I had a patient leave once, because I bragged too much about my being passive-aggressive with a surgical office. They had sent the patient to me for the pre-op. I faxed then note with the H & P which read "OK for surgery." The office called me back and said they wouldn't do the surgery unless it said "Cleared for surgery." I already know what Leslie would say here. And, I said the same thing. I will not send another note. If you don't want to do the surgery, then don't. Of course, in the end, I would have had to if it meant the child didn't get the surgery she needed. But, I called the surgeon himself and when he heard the story he asked his staff and they told him the same thing. Then I heard him tell everyone that was completely ridiculous. But, I guess when I told the mother kind of off the cuff, she must have thought I had risked her daughter's welfare. Oh well.

As far as the Paperport. It's hard for me since I haven't used it. I can tell you how I do it.

All of our faxes come in as PDFs into a program, but it's just as well to say they come into an inbox. We open them and name them. If it is a refill request, given it is in Adobe, whoever opens it, uses the typewriter icon to make a check mark next to "yes refill it," and then write the number of refills. Finally, I use my signature stamp to sign it. I then choose the printer icon and print to fax. Then I save it and import it. If anyone else does it, then I open it, approve it and save it. I think you can do that pretty much in Paperport as well.

Jennifer,

Hope you enjoyed your Glenlivet.
I know you are using the Brother MFC so you can fax anything anywhere, hopefully from any station in your office.
Mark up your faxed requests for refills, stamp your signature and then, with the document still "opened" hit the "Print" icon on your paperport toolbar. This then brings up several printing options. Choose your Brother PC fax "printer". You will then get a little window that looks like a telephone fax machine. Type in the fax number of the pharmacy (usually always given on their refill request) and hit send. Your script is now faxed, provided their number is not busy. The Brother software also has a PC Fax address book into which you can store frequently faxed numbers, such as pharmacies, other doctors, labs, physical therapy places, etc.
Go to "Start"... "Programs"..."Brother"..."MFL-Pro Suite" ..."PC-Fax Address Book" and add numbers ad infinatum. Now on your Brother Fax Telephone thingy, it has a button "Address Book". If you click this it will open the PC-Adress Book. Double click on the number you want and it will now appear in the window of the little fax machine. Hit "Send"
Your Brother PC-Fax should show up as a "printer" option for any printing function on any computer onto which the software was loaded. Fax emails, Word documents, AC items etc.

And I agree with your peeve above. I had one today. I basically said the patient looked fine to me the last time I saw them however I have not examined them since (date) and have no current labs or other diagnostic studies upon which to base that decision. I figure if they do not like that, they can tell the patient they need a formal preoperative consultation and that they should schedule an appointment and be adequately evaluated which, in all likelihood will delay their surgery.

And Bert, you are right. I know you know what I would have said.

Leslie, waiting on the Amaretta to kick in.

All I can say is Thank God for V & H.

Venting and Heineken.

Really helpful thread. Hope to get fully paperless some day.

Just a quick question: What is the life of your Brother MFC machine? I use the MFC 7420 and since buying new machines was cheaper than getting a new drum unit and cartridge I would just buy a new one. However now my machines seem to be less reliable. I still get about 30-40 thousand pages out of them (yes we go through that much paper with the faxes). What are other people's experiences (I also have a Canon Multifunction machine yet my office staff misses the old Brother). Thanks.

I am going on 2 years with my newest Brother MFC 8600DN. I have not yet changed the drum (although it says it should be changed). I print out so little now. My older Brother MFC has to be around 5 years old and still working faithfully in my billing office. I only replaced it so that I would have fax-to-PC capabilities. I have replaced the drum in it once.

Leslie

It is the paper feed mechanism that seems to fail for me. One machine which I'm about to swap out still faxes fine yet won't copy. I'm envious because I'm sure you probably do not have the 20 ream a month (10,000 page) habit my practice has.

I have an MFC 8670DN and so far ok after a year yet a little tricky with the paper feed from the tray (can't load too many sheets in or it won't feed.) The Brothers are so easy to work and my staff and I really like them, yet under heavy use I've seen only average reliability. (My home machine is going along great at 2 1/2 years yet it is still well under 5000 pages).

Thanks for the feedback.

Hi,

So I'm a little confused. I think I remember reading that it is possible to receive faxes without direct USB connection and to have them received as PDFs... is this possible or not?

We have a Brother MFC-9840CDW with PaperPort V11.1.

Thanks,

- S.K.

P.S. The way our office is set up, we would have to run wires across the floor (classic tripping hazard) to connect USB directly to the nearest PC (there's not really any other way to set the office up that efficiently uses the small space we have). So any way to receive faxes over the network would be ideal - otherwise we will need to purchase a very looong USB cable and lay it across the floor right were we walk.

Any help would be appreciated! I hope they have something about this at the ACUC.

- S.K.

S.K.

I am kind of biased, because I am not a big Brother fan. I seem to be the only one in that circle. I have helped a few of my friends with their Brothers, and I have always found networking it to be an issue. FYI: This is my experience. Everyone else on here has no problem. I have also read many posts on here where the Brother was shared from a computer using a USB connection, which I could never do. I think part of the allure of the Brother is also the downside (IMHO) is that it is a good value for the money.

Your 9840CDW is Ethernet compatible and, therefore, should be connected that way so that everyone can connect to it easily. You should be able to everything, e.g. print, copy, fax, scan, scan to fax, scan to PC, and both fax to PC and PC to fax. The only question is whether the Fax to PC delivers the fax directly as a PDF file and not a tiff. I know it can be converted in Paperport, but if that were the case, it would be an issue for me. Your model is a step up from most and may be able to do so.

I emailed Brother just now asking them to comment on their MFCs and on their 9840 in particular. I am supposed to get an answer within a day.

If I were you, I would plug it into an Ethernet jack and share it out from there. You could also call your representative and ask about the best way to Fax to PC and network.

You could purchase USB extenders that allow you to go further than standard USB by using CAT five cables between connections. I use them on my EKG machines.

mkweiss,

That's a great idea! Still think that a $700 machine should be able to network with Ethernet. Which it states it can.

I did get my answer back from Brother about the ability for the above machine to fax directly to a computer in PDF format.

Their answer: We are unable to provide assistance as to your question based on the information provided. Please contact Technical Support tomorrow for further assistance. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

Information provided? I simply asked, "Can the Brother 9840 fax to PC in PDF format?" That's either yes or no.

Bert,

Haha, got to love automated support systems. I will give them a call and make sure I talk to a live human. I will ask how to get the Fax to PC to work properly and whether the Faxes can come through in PDF format.

Thanks for the help!

- S.K.

Thank you for your inquiry about the MFC-9840CDW. When receiving faxes to your computer through the PC-Fax Receive software, you can set the software to receive faxes in .tif or .max format. The .max format is specifically for the PaperPort software that the faxes are received into. You will not have the option to have the fax received in PDF format, although you should be able to use a third party file converter to convert the files to PDF with no issue.

Wow, I thought I posted this last night. Sorry. This was the exact email from Brother. I will say, after my email back, support got back to me right away (you have to remember I am not a customer so I have to kind of fudge it and say I am asking for on here).

The bottom line, tif is tif. .max is a proprietary format from Brother for Paperport. Basically, and Leslie please correct me if I'm wrong, when a .max comes in to Paperport, it allows Paperport to do anything and everything with that document. It is extremely user friendly and powerful. The problem is YOU CAN'T GET IT TO COME TO YOUR DESKTOP AS A PDF. So, if you didn't want to use Paperport and you wanted PDF as many do, you can't with Brother. That has always been my issue with Brother.

Now, please, for those who love Brother and don't mind the conversion IF they need it, forgive me. I don't mean to offend anyone.

I think everyone who uses Brother should talk to the support or developers and see if it can be delivered in PDF. On my Xerox (which doesn't have .max to be fair), you can click either .tif or .pdf. That is the standard after all.

Oh, and look around for a stray post. I must have put it somewhere else.

I have the Brother 8660dn (I think). Files come in as .max or .tif. They must be converted to PDF. That is far an away the biggest complaint I have. Faxes are received by the brother machine and shared over the network. I can manipulate faxes, import into AC and fax Rxs directly to the pharmacy from any computer.
PP12 has a little file that allows you to automatically convert faxes to PDFs but when I set up PP12 on a windows 7 machine and made it the main computer on which the files were received from the Brother machine, it kept crashing and was virtually unusable. The Paperport support people just say that it is not meant to be networked. So, after days of frustration, I just went back to receiving the faxes onto my computer running XP with PP9 and sharing it over the network and it seems to work ok.
IF this doesn't make sense, I would be happy to share the details of how I set up the network with the Brother machine with anyone who is interested.

I guess I am just very sensitive in making sure I don't hurt anyone's feelings who have Brothers. I even posted one time over two years ago that the Brother was a good deal, etc. At the time, I didn't know it wouldn't import in .pdf.

I have used Muratec, Toshiba and Xerox, and they all do. They are way more expensive so I understand. I do want to make it clear that if someone wants to find anything wrong with those, it's OK.

Networking it shouldn't be a problem. You should be able to attach it to the network via the R45 jack and the Ethernet cable and use print drivers to connect. I know that Paperport comes with it, and I believe Leslie says that previous versions work with WIN7. I would call Paperport and find out why their latest version doesn't work with Microsoft's latest version. Maybe they will have an update soon.

I just don't understand a company who has the capacity to Fax to PC not allowing the .pdf format.