Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Version 5.0

Tha ag old question.

When will version 5.0 be out?

Hello Dr. Paiano,

Version 5 is in alpha testing. As soon as we sure there are no major unexpected bugs (it is looking good) it will go to beta. Hopefully that will not be to long. Then on to general release. I wish I could give a date but I really can't. We want to sure the release is as good as we can make it.

Claire

Hi Claire!

Hey Wayne whats up?

Hope they are treating you well.

Claire

Since I have been out of the loop for the last several weeks after having surgery, can someone please elaborate on what version 5 has as improvements over the current version. (I wanna guage how excited this nearly 50 year old should be).
I am aware of the erx improvements, what else? The practice management portion is not in this upcoming version, correct?

Thanks in advance

Happy Holidays! On this Christmas day, Amazing Charts V5 beta is available for our user board to play with! You can download and try out V5 here.

Merry Christmas!
Jon

Please submit any bugs or issues you encounter! We anticipate the "official release" to be in the next few weeks providing there are no serious issues found during beta testing.

What a wonderful Christmas present!!
Thanks Santa and Jon!

Awesome! I hope it will let me play at home without registering that computer as my "license" site.

oops...just as occurred when I tried to install 4.73, I get the Error 1722. Will need to chat up Support next week.

Fixed by deleting the existing amazingcharts.xml and creating a new one manually.

OK, after 2 hours of playing

Installation went very smoothly form 4.060 (not the latest, but what I had on my laptop/test computer)

When installed, I clicked on the icon (now a blue color) and it had to configure for about 10 minutes (this has occurred in V4 intermittently. The tuner took a while, it shows you what it is upgrading and several of them took 5 minutes a piece.

Lots of new features, seemed to work well. I will need to spend some time configuring the health maintenance.

Search is revamped. Somewhat for better and worse. It crashed once and took the entire AC program with it. I searched for patients not seen in >12 months, it showed some who were < 12 months (tried the opposite, same results, changed order (also had age restrictions) no change)). Did the search a different way, It worked well.

eprescribing looks cool. able to pull up pharmacies by zip or street name. Did not try to send, have not completed enrollment, requires faxing back info.

Admin better laid out. Has ability to have enhanced security with timed logout and requiring password reset after time. Can be turned on or off.

It commented I had more high level providers (dummy and residents) than I have paid for.

That's all for now. Time to eat and rejoin the family.

I love the new e-prescribing. Printed, faxed and eRx on a single window from the patients chart, including the pharmacy list. Excellent improvement. Daresay even Vicki will like this!

You can also go onto the new crop screens and do more (should do formularies really soon) - refills are still cumbersome due to some SureScripts requirement that you open the individual patients chart and look at all their meds, but they are trying to design a workflow - I suggested that refill requests come from pharmacies and generate an e-mail in AC messaging that would allow you to open patient's scrip writer and refill. Hopefully they will finalize and develop this soon.

E scrips also auto sync - if you use New Crop or AC screens it will update in the chart. Works great.

I am so excited to try this, but should I install at work or keep Version 4 until official release?

If you have time - backup your version 4 and make sure you have the version 4 installer and then upgrade. If it doesn't work you can go back to version 4, but it is pretty stable and most of the time install is easy (particularly if you have standard configuration).

I have tried AC version 5 and here are my views:
1. Love the E-prescribing, seems like how it used to work on Allscripts but easier. Have not activated it yet though so yet to try completely, also this seems to be free on version 5? No 420 annual fee would be nice!
2. Easier to look at in general-including admin section
3. A lot, and I mean a lot of the same features I have seen (gimmicks and some helpful) that I assume came from CCHIT and some seem like they can improve workflow (problem is getting staff on board! ie. Tracking labs!). Also ordering is more refined.
4. I think overall a nice improvement, although I am still awaiting the PM side of things that I feel will help my practice more than Version 5. Although I feel we are now as enhanced as some of the big players in EMR and have same type of features!

Do I think this is a fabulous start, yes, but I still feel like the main issue is getting PM system integrated, so I am glad Version 5 is now almost out of the way to clear the path to version 6!

PS. I am happy that this has happened, interesting how I am not usually the one that notices a lot of extras, but the Health Maintanence and other enhancements are gimmicky and I know needed for certification but interesting how government is interfering with medicine, clearly becoming more visible! Also the feel is a lot more in line with Allscripts and ECW but of course easier to use! Huge bonus and what sets AC apart, other than price point of course!
Jack

PS. Since I am playing with this on my home computer, not live in office, I am not sure it is autoupdating, seems like inbox is auto-updating but not quite sure yet? Any input?

Also, forgot to mention I got used to AC not doing some of the fancy things that Allscripts used to do since that is the system I used to use, now it does most of them, really exciting! Again, kudos to Jon!

Still playing, but backup still seems somewhat flaky.

Ran into problem with search, but overall it works well (yeah).

Immunizations still have my head scratching, but I am still figuring that out.

Ran into a crash with editing the HM sections.

These would make it seem like it is buggy. That is far from the truth, it is a better version of V4, probably could be used in production environ.

I am picking the areas I had problems in V4 as well as new things to both understand and troubleshoot them.

Just eprescribing alone may make me want to go live soon, so I need to be comfortable it is bulletproof before I jump.

Agree, so far seems pretty stable

HM sections can have value if used properly. It can be set up to make sure you do not miss anything, as well as jump through P4P hoops many systems are implementing. I do like how they show what the quality of the evidence is on some of the items. While many physicians follow these guidelines, many do not and patients can miss valuable screenings.

The key is to set it up such to make information entry automatically part of the process and have staff do most of the background work, thus it becomes automatic on the part of the provider without extra work.

If you figure that out great, I am glad it is modifiable since USPTF ?msp guidelines are not what most of us follow, we follow our own boards guidelines such as AFP and ACOG ie. mammograms still recommended q1-2 years at age 40.
But again, if governement P4P makes USPTF guidelines the standard we are all screwed since we cannot do what's right for our patients and prevent malpractice suits (example would be guidelines mammogram >50yo only would miss a few breast cancers-the task force feels this is ok, but the lawyers that would come after us I am sure would be salivating!!!)

So far this seems like a nice update. Mainly the eRx would be the greatest change which is great. The incorporation of 5minute clinical is a nice touch. The HM module is nearly useless for specialists so that doesn't help me but I'm sure will help my PCPs. The letter writer is unchanged . Hopefully I can turn off a lot of the little irritating things. For instance, it puts a note in my plan if I look up something in 5mcc. I don't really need that going out to my referring providers on my note.

I'll keep playing. It does fix an annoying thing in the letter writer where the database would not immediately update if I added a referring provider. I always had to restart AC. Not anymore! The little things make a big difference.

Allergy button is nice as well

tried to install today. seemed OK but asked for database tuner. error message regarding 'meds'. finally uninstalled and put back ver 4.073 from backup file. I may wait until angel can help before trying again. I tend to find anything that can go wrong, better me then others.

I had the same problem and my IT guy had to fix the issue. It is a problem allowing access to the database. You have to allow access the the "Meds" database portion and then it installs flawless. Hope that helps, unfortunately I can't provide more info than that but I had same issue so you are alone!

It took about 3 hours, but now my office is up and running on Version 5! Looks good so far!

Joe got me up and running in under an hour today on ver 5.0 and I updated sixteen workstations in under 3 hours. My staff is going to have fun tomorrow! Thank you SO MUCH. My smile is better than the guy in your ads holding the tablet right now. Only downside is it seems to load a bit slower, not surprising considering all the added functionality.

Wow, 16 workstations! I have 5 Yeah mine took 3 hours because initial hiccup and also loaded one computer at a time

Please tell us all how it works.
I'm eager to hear what/if any bugs exist. I'll install probably after the first update.

You got it, tomorrow is the first test with live patients

Wow, and I thought I was brave. I installed V5 over the weekend on my sandbox machine, and I would guestimate at least two to three weeks of playing with it before going live. Just too much all at once, and I like to be an "expert" on it so I can teach and answer the many questions that come from the staff.

@Jack So you have been using it on dead patients first?

My staff is integral to my practice...like a family. they will help figure out how to get it to mimic our pre-AC charts. We have been doing many things manually with ver 4, but expect many more things to be done automatically now in ver 5.

Bert,
I hope I am not that brave? I felt that the test version I placed on a non-integrated computer was stable, hope I am not wrong!
Jack
PS. No not dead, just test pt's LOL- sorry poor sense of humor!

Well here goes! I'm uploading it to a laptop to run stand alone and see what it has. My IT guy will skin me alive and then place me out for the fire ants to eat if I try to put it on the server before proper testing on his part. But gee.. I'm like a kid before Christmas, I GOTTA see what's in the box!!

Working well so far, so far only issue I have is I created order templates for "multiple" lab orders and they cannot be added to tracked orders together, only individually. You can go to "Other" tab and order form there, but not saving to plan like it did previously!

okay, let me tell you about my morning of patients after version 5. I had 2 computers crash; I do not think that these problems are related to version 5 but rather either hardware or a virus; that is being investigated. I am having problems with Dragon commands that I had created as the windows have changed, I am able to get good forwarding capability, but cannot access the menu bar as I cannot press alt key without another key, and alt F brings up the forwarding function. I have a great idea: It would be nice to have messages refresh upon closing a chart rather than by time or press. Also, I would like to have the chart window maximized by default. Overall, no disaster, my office is adjusting, congratulations to the beta team so far.

I have a problem with database tuner for v5. Error message: invalid object name AppInfo ? this is on windows xp.
Had no problems upgrading to v5 and runnig tuner on windows7. Any ideas ?

Hi Dariusz

You need to run the tuner on the main database only. Is your AC main database on the W7 or XP machine? If your main database is indeed XP, please contact us at 866-382-5932 so we can login and assist. If your XP is a local, just run the installer only.

Please let us know how you make out.

Trish

Thank you for quick response Trish.
I am going to use laptop with xp for testing and training so this is going to be "main computer install".

You're welcome.
Your reply leads me to a few questions....has AC ever been installed on the XP? Does it have a database? If the answer is yes, I would like to login to take a look at the issue. It could be that you're installing to the wrong directory. If the answer is no, you do not need to run the tuner because it does not have a database to tune.

The answer is yes.
It was runing v4 with databases installed in C/program files/amazing charts directory.
I am going to call tomorrow so you can login and look around.

You could also try running the optimizer within the utilities and see if that helps (run tuner again after optimizing your database). Please make sure you backup your database before running utilities.
Sounds good-I look forward to hearing from you.

Trish