Home Forums Discussions General Discussion UP N ARMS OVER VERSION 5

It seems as if we are all relly ready for the illustrious version 5. I think amazing charts has been a good program for us as a small rural clinic and we would not have an emr without it. I just wanted to send a shout out the AC staff who, I am sure, is working hard to get us an excellent update that will be good for everyone. Here is a shout out to all the people who work so hard to make this thing happen behind the scenes. Keep up the good work and God's speed on the completion of version 5.

Agreed.

I also agree - 4.0.73 works great and is very stable for me. Version 5 will be icing on cake so to speak.

I too agree, I have been very happy with AC and I have really had no issues with the program. I look forward to V5. Kudos to the staff.

Luis Galano
Family Practice
Lynn Haven, FL

I too have been happy with AC and any problems have been handled well by tech support and they have called to check out bug reports and we have been able to figure out fixes. This has been much appreciated. 4.073 has been good. AC let me get up and running with an electronic record within the first month of opening a new practice. Initial help by tech support helped with tips for newbie's.

I have had a great experience with version 4.073, I am a new member. I have to say though this waiting for version 5 is tough! I am excited about what changes are going to come to make our lives better. Hope we are getting closer to PM software.
Jack

When? Does anyone have any insight as to when version 5 will be released? I, too, am happy with the 4.073, but it's the eRx improvements that I'm looking for. What else does it reportedly improve on? Thanks...

Could not resist adding my two cents worth. I also am a big fan of AC, as are my two partners. We can't imagine having gotten started with any other EMR and would never give it up at this point. People without an EMR have no idea what they are missing. It has a HUGE impact on the quality of care you can practice. (doesn't mean you will, but you can) Most anybody who has taken the leap is in the catagory of those who will practice better medicine. I am only in a hurry for version 5 so we can move on to version 6!

Several times in the past 2 years we have had use of the free English search mode. Januvia maybe linked to pancreatitis? We have had 6 cases of Acute Pancreatitis in the past 2-1/2 years and 5 of those were diabetic, none were on Januvia. Took less than three minutes. It is soooo coool. Nothing in the past 20 years of medicine has compared to EMR's for me, except MAYBE the MRI, and I don't get an MRI every day, but I use the EMR EVERY day, (especially when on call.)

Guess I am saying, just glad to be here.

Hahaha...got you thinking, eh Martin? (Inside joke)

Leslie

( yeah but I'm thinking Pancreatitis should produce a fair amount of weight loss, so what is the down side?)

(I have heard pancreatitis can alter travel plans!)

Thought you might be near Whidbey, but I checked the map, boy was I lost. The chamber of commerce maps and photos for Orcas Island are spectacular for sure! mts

You are right, David. Snakes on a plane is nothing compared to Puke on a plane.

Leslie

AC is great
but i am still desperately waiting for V5 (based on rumors of what it can do more, eprescribe, PM ......)

Was at AOA convention in New Orleans - Jon is demoing version 5 - has lots of health maintenance, search capabities as well as eprescribing (does not easily do refill requests from pharmacy, but he says that will be released soon). PM is not in version 5 (is working on it, but had to get CCHIT stuff done). New version is much better - he hopes to release in December. It really is good with some medical decision making things like 5 minute clinical consult and a link to uptodate.com as well as lots of new searching capabilities.

December is fast approaching. I guess that's our Christmas present.

Have they said anything at all about the potential release for the PM portion? And we're still looking at December for the V5?

When I talked to sales I was told v5 in December and v6, with PM, "early next year."

I still don't know what to do about practice management. Right now were using a kludge of MTBC and quicken, which makes for a lot of extra work (or at least it seems that way).

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and get quicken for medical offices and stick with our billing company. Everything else seems to be web based or expensive while what we're doing has the advantage of being the devil we know. So to speak.

Has the letter writer finally been fixed - i.e. can we now actually edit a saved letter, or do we still have to start over from scratch and redo the entire letter just to fix one typo? And can we now change the default font in the letter writer? For many specialists, the current letter writer makes Amazing Charts almost unusable when seeing consults.

No the leter writer has not changed. Unfortunately I can see where this is an issue and I do not know if any EMR's make it possible to change something easily. I know that for some time at my hospital if my dictation came out wrong I had to scratch it out - send it back, etc. to have them send me an edited copy which was a pain, but that was the way it was. Now I can look at it on our dictaphone system and use Word to edit it, but the editing is difficult and then sign.

I am not sure when and if Jon can make this change - it seems to me that making a letter be a permanent part of the medical record and thereby making it legal will be difficult with using Word or Wordpad. I do wish you could make fancy fonts add highlighting, underlining, etc but I am not sure how he will do that. Ironically my specialists send letters all the time with warnings like "Dictated with speech recognition software, so sound alike errors" and things like this. I guess I feel like once I sign I have to live with the typos or redo them.

I've never used the letter writer, so not sure what the advantage would be anyway. I just open Word, type a letter, make it .pdf, FAX it, and import into AC. It's very fast that way.

Instead of using the internal letter writer, my understanding is that best practice was to keep your templates in wordpad, MSword or whatever your word processor of choice and then print to PDF and save to chart. Similar to what is done for flowsheets.

For specialists and consult documentation, the practice I remember was to print an encounter in the SOAP format and then just send that with any cover letter you might have. See previous post by Travis on SOAP note format

As a specialist, the letter writer is one of the most crucial things for us. Communication to our referring docs is what makes our practices thrive. So opening up Word and typing a letter can be painful.

The bonus of AC's letter writer (and I agree it needs work), is that it has the referring physician built in with address, the patient's name, and the note I just wrote. Mine are somewhat generic but the communication is there. I just template a generic reply (i.e. I saw this patient and here's what I think. Let me know if you have any questions). I then add my assessment and plan which is the main part of what my referring docs need to know (i.e. am I operating on them or do they need something else).

It definitely is quicker than dictating an entire letter to the doc after I dictated the entire consult.

I use the letter writer for pre-op H&P's. I would like the second and additional pages to have the page number, Patient name and date of birth on them, but you know what? I have a ball point pen and just write it on for now. I know the day will come when John gets it done, but I want the Version 5 and 6 done first! It is still just awesome to do an H&P this way. I have them finished before I leave the room and after the MA sends a fax to the Hospital and the Surgeon, we give the original to the patient in case anyone loses the copy we faxed. It is really great.

Martin: How did your son do on his interviews?
Also, why do you use the letter writer for pre-ops, and not just print off a regular "complete note?"

I like the letter writer, (to a consultant) as it puts the Re: Jane Doe header at the top and allows me to introduce a paragraph BEFORE the body of the note, which says "This is the Pre-Op H&P and the patient is CLEARED for SURGERY." I think this saves time for everyone who is sorting out various pages of faxed material.

As for Eric, (my oldest, not Brandon, #2 who was on the Ducati at Branson) but Eric has been accepted at Kirksville and the school in Tennessee, as well as Western University of Health Sciences here in Calif. (my alma mater) As soon as he heard from Western he canceled the remaining interviews. We are scheduling some meetings with a few Bankers for step 2!

It seems the workaround for now is to cut and paste from AC to Word, then take the final edit back to AC (cut and paste again? or as a .pdf

Bert has a thorough explanation of his workaround here.

For specialists, the letter writer is actually one of the most important parts of an EMR. In fact, a good letter writer can save a specialist thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of extra work each year by automatically generating a properly addressed and formatted letter from the clinic visit note. A well designed letter writer allows the physician to click a single button and then automatically draws any desired sections of the visit note + any additional templated text into a letter, with the referring physician's name and address already filled in. Compare that one click solution versus the arcane cutting and pasting into Word that we have to do now in order to create a professional-looking consult letter from the Amazing Charts note. When you multiply the extra few minutes it takes to create the letter by the number of consults seen by a specialist daily, it adds up quickly. It's the difference between going home on time or having the time to actually eat lunch versus getting home late (again) or having just 5 minutes to quickly eat a sandwich before starting clinic back up again in the afternoon. I realize the letter writer might not matter to some GPs, but hopefully Jon can understand why it's so important to many of his other customers.

Unlike chart notes, which cannot be edited after signing for medicolegal reasons, the letter writer actually needs to produce easily editable text if it is to be of any use to physicians who routinely send out consult reports.

keep up the good work! AC has been great for my clinic.
Brandon M.D.