Home Forums Discussions Problems Printing an entire chart to a single pdf/word doc

I use Actfax (fax server) to receive and send all of my faxes without printing a page. Sending entire charts to patients' providers, new providers, insurance companies etc however is a problem. The option I am familiar with prints out several separate pdf files (I don't print the chart to paper) that I then have to sit and assemble before sending it out.

Has anyone else found a solution to this problem?
Any suggestions?

Thanks

AC can print out the entire complete chart as a single file, I believe.

How is that done?

Mikeal,
Great name. I gather you are Russian? My mom's side is almost half russian. And my wife is pretty good a speaking Russian actually.

Anyway, Bring up the patient's name even just at the first main AC desktop window as you would to add them to an appointment, a message or anything else. Highlight them with a standard left click, then give 'em a right click and all these options come up in a window. Just about in the middle of that window is "print entire chart". And as you begin the process, AC brings up a new window to fill out that covers you for HIPAA as you document who and why you are printing this entire chart for. Now that is recorded and saved for that rainy (Hi there Rainy) day when someone tries to bother you about, why did you release that chart. Pretty simple. That recording of the release date will be on the patient's main demographic page if you ever care to find it.

I wish that this data was in the imported items area or the past encounters area where we could print or show it if and when needed.

Suggestion to all you Newbies. Set up one or two "false patients" early on with a low chart number. Now you and your people can play to your hearts delight with all the features of the program, all without worring about putting bad stuff in a real patient's chart. We have James Bond and poor James is a very sick man. Our last program (but that is another story for some other day) had a few pre-made, sectioned off from the main database false patients too.

I have asked AC to allow for a separate sectioned off place for this but as of yet no reply or implimentation. Right now as we create encounters for James his data and his monitary totals get factored in with the rest of the practice and that day, which is really very inappropriate and even dangerous. We should have a way to enter folks like false patients, our own kids, our own parents and in-laws, all of whom who we don't charge for, but we should none the less be tracking what we do for them, just in case. CMS says we shouldn't bill for these and that makes sense. But every time my kid has an allergy issue or a clogged ear doesn't mean that we are calling or having a visit at their PCP and she is cool with that. So we should have a way to section off a dozen or two charts as, not part of the main practice, off line, and not being calculated into the practice's data and demographics stuff. I feel the more AC becomes a PM, the more important this becomes.
But there you have it....Hope this helps.

Paul

You know it's funny, because I thought I had AC down pretty well. But, whenever I go to "print the entire chart," I get the summary. If I want the progress notes (which are the most important thing to print), I have to choose print notes and consultant notes, which allows you to print messages and addenda along with the progress notes, but not all at once. So, it does some like you would have to print four PDFs and possibly five, if you print imported items.

I am not sure how ActFax is set up, I did peruse the website for a bit. Given that, I am not sure if you print ten progress notes if it will fax to one PDF. My guess is it will. I can print literally hundreds of progress notes to a single PDF using Adobe Acrobat or probably many other 3rd party Acrobat applications.

I just print all of the pages into a temporary folder and from there assembled them into a pdf file using adobe standard. From there printing it to Actfax. It takes extra time but it will work presently.

Thanks for everybody's help

Actually, when I looked again, I did see that all of the notes were there when I printed the entire chart.

But, that seems like way too many steps.

I would call ActFax and find out why you can't print directly to it with a print/fax driver and have it go out as one pdf.

At the very least, you should be able to print using an Adobe print driver or a 3rd party pdf driver and make on file and fax that. We can easily choose to print to our Adobe print driver and save it to the desktop or anywhere and then do what we want to do with it. Good luck.

Cheers

mikael,

I looked at their manual from their website and it looks like if you wanted to accumulate fax pages, you can fax as you normally do, then in the print menu, select "more settings" and choose the "Accumulate Documents" to spool multiple documents.

Hope that makes sense.

scslmd - i'm not quite sure where you are seeing the "more settings" on actfax. I sent off an e-mail to actfax and am waiting for a response.

The easiest way to solve this it seems to me, irregardless of what fax program/server is used, would be to have just one file produced when printing off progress notes, addenda, imported items, etc. Whenever I chose the "print entire chart" feature I get 3-4 separate files and several more separate adobe files containing each imported item separately (ex: if I have 15 imported pdf's of labs imported at different times I get 15 adobe files popping up). Whichever method I use to assemble these separate files is cumbersome. It would be much easier (at least for me) to chose the entire chart or whatever documentation is needed by another physician (PCP, another specialist, insurance co, medicare/medicaid audits) and end up with just 1 file that could be faxed/e-mailed/etc.

Thanks

Mikael,

OK, here is how you do it. Three steps. But, you will need the actual Adobe Acrobat 8.0. Maybe 7.0. Don't know. And, maybe other less expensive Acrobats or third parties will work -- heaven knows I must have 50 Adobe print drivers and at least ten readers. But, I can tell you it WILL work with the actual program. Pricey, but...hey.

You click on print entire chart. Yes, you're right, it doesn't do it. It prints out the summary and then it prints out the progress notes and messages, addendum, etc. Do NOT check the imported items button. In fact, in Amazing Charts, not clicking the Imported items button is probably always the way to go. So, once you bring up the print all chart window, click on preview or print. Personally, I like preview but that's just I. Browse to your pdf print driver (may as well use the expensive one by Adobe) and print the summary and notes to two Adobe files. So, now you have TWO pdfs. Now, go to the Imported folder for that patient. Do NOT try to print the 15 imported pdfs from the program itself. I would suggest actually making a shortcut to the ImportItems folder in the AC chart to your desktop.

So, you have the two files. You open the ImportItems folder from your shortcut and you browse to this patient by number, say 1078. Open it up and there will be your 15 PDF files you imported. Drag the first two files into the folder. Highlight them all blue. Right click on the entire set of files AND if you have the real Adobe, you will see a Combine supported files in ACrobat....Click this and you can make either one pdf or a really cool zipped file with a cover sheet. There you go. Three steps and one file. You save the new complete PDF to your desktop or wherever and the 15 files will still be there. You can delete the other two or leave them there...doesn't matter -- you won't see them in the chart anyway.

If you have any questions, please let me know or email me.

OR, you could just use File Assistant Pro instead of importing things. It's awesome and it's free. But, you would be the first <G>

But the File Assistant Pro depends on receiving digital files especially from your fax machine to your desktop.

We print to pdf (primopdf), it does open in multiple windows.

Then merge those pdf using a merge software. Works for us. Takes heck of a lot less time than paper printing still. We send records on CD.

I agree.

Do you have Microsoft Office Professional? It has Microsoft Document Image Writer which I find very simple to use as far as adding and deleting pages to a file. You chose it as a printer, combine your files by adding the pages to one of them then send that file off as a fax. Not cool for email since a lot of people do not have Office Professional, but if you only need to fax the file it would be easy.
I also find it cumbersome to print an entire chart, it would be easier if it could print as one file to fax or email.

Mikael,

OK, I found another workaround. Everyone has great suggestions; you just have to find the best one for you. I think the 3rd party PDF solutions are great and some are free. I took a look at the primopdf that Joseph mentioned, and it is very helpful and links to a site with an incredible amount of pdf software.

In my opinion (mine only) I think that if you are going to use a lot of digital printing to pdf, then to fax, etc. it is helpful to have at least ONE actual Adobe 8.0 program. Yes, Adobe is pricey, but at least you get to install it on two PCs, unlike Microsoft software (excluding laptop exceptions, which seems a bit unfair to those with two desktops, but that's a story for a different day). Now, there are other merge pdf programs, but Adobe tends to do it best. And, I am not sure how other 3rd party programs would do with my suggested method. In fact, in researching and playing with a solution for you (which may not work for you), it is now our solution. OK, so here it is:

As before, I think it is helpful for the person responsible for faxing your records to have a shortcut to the Imported Items folder on his or her desktop. It saves you the trouble of having to browse to the folder. You are correct that not only will you have files for the progress notes, etc., if you have 20 imported items, you will then have X + 20 files to work with.

1. Right-click on the patient's name in the Patient List and note his or her ID#
2. Choose "Print Entire Chart," do the release or records windows, which then brings you to the "Print Entire Chart" dialog box.
3. Check "Entire Chart Detail" ONLY. Leaving out the summary is my choice (may not be anyone else's), but I find it contains a lot of useless, redundant information. If it had a 'true' problem list rather than a list of ICD-9 diagnoses, maybe. I don't think anyone would ever call you back and say, "Where is the summary sheet." A good example is I just started a practice this year, and hundreds of patients transferred from my old practice where we used AC. I have not looked at any of the summaries of the records sent to me. In fact, they just take up space. But, again, just my opinion.
4. DO NOT CHECK: Imported Items.
5. Click on preview. Then click on the second icon. The little green one with the arrow pointing up and to the right.
6. In the Export window, name the file "0" or "3" or "e"; it doesn't matter -- just something quick. Browse to your Imported Items folder on your desktop or wherever you keep it. Again, a shortcut on that PC would make it simpler. Browse to the folder with the patient ID and click on it. This may be one that has 15 to 20 files. Of course, you won't see any of them, because the save type is HTML. Click on Save, and you will watch it export the notes and messages to the ImportItems folder as an HTML file. When it is finished, close the window in front of you. At this point, with two or three clicks, you will have your entire chart (minus the summary sheet -- which you could include if you want) in the Imported Items folder along with all of your imported items. So, in actuality, you could go home, go to lunch whatever knowing that patient number 9999 or whatever has his or her entire record in his or her Imported Items folder.
7. When you are ready to make one file, open up folder 9999 or whichever, highlight all of the files, right-click and choose "Combine files in Acrobat."
8. Although Adobe is pricey, the combine files box has a ton of nice options including the ability to either combine the files into one pdf or to put all of the files into a pdf package. Plus, you can move files up or down, meaning you could put the notes at the top of your file if you wished. Not all of your files in your imported folder will be pdfs, but the notes you just "printed" there will always be on top if they are by virtue of the .htm extension coming before .pdf.
9. Once made, I would save the file into the same folder. Now you will have the native imported files, the files from AC and the entire record pdf in the folder. You can, of course, delete the latter two if you wish or keep either or both. They will not be seen as imports from within Amazing Charts, since they were not imported using the import tool of AC.

So, with two steps you have your record you can fax which is saved conveniently in his or her folder in case you need to fax it again or whatever.

Hope this helps. Sorry, for the length of it.

Mikael,

Did you find your solution? If not, please let us know where you are with this so we can try to be of more assistance.

Thanks everyone for their help.

I do use primopdf (love it) but found it a bit too lengthy/cumbersome of a process to make a pdf file to fax. My office staff mainly do these things and if it takes more than 30 seconds or 5 steps something is likely to get messed up whenever a pc is involved.

I do have a copy of adobe 7 standard that I got along with a fujitsu scanner. I tried bert's approach and it works well.

I also have office professional and it is easy to use, but I agree that opening it up on the other end may cause a problem.

I mainly want to stick with pdf files since that seems to be the most ubiquitous in electronic interoffice communication and also allows security to be applied if needed.

I tried both ways that Bert described and noticed that when the html file was converted to pdf in adobe a lot of them seemed "out of sync" so a page would start on half of one page and end on another. I did not see this problem when printing to the adobe pdf driver.

I figure that I will print out the instructions and give them to my office staff for reference.

I also started using updox to more efficiently file away the labs/incoming documents from the fax server. This has worked well so far and there is also a solution to this problem (similar to Bert's solution).

Scott Clemensen has this solution in updox:

This is a great topic and I have experimented around with multiple ways of doing it. I think I have the answer for specific situations:
-With pt name highlighted in main AC window, first note the patient's ID number (you will see why later) and without opening patients chart, right click on the name and select "print entire chart"
-Provide info on who you are releasing records to (insurance company)
-In next box, select "entire chart summary" and "entire chart detail"...DO NOT select "imported items" DO NOT select PRINT, or the pages will be sent to your default printer. Select "Preview"
-From the printing Preview, select the printer icon in the upper left hand corner, and select the Apractis-UpDox printer from the list of printers. You will have to do this twice, once for the face sheet and demographics, and once for the progress note detail.
-Now load the documents into the UpDox workspace from the Interface menu
- Right click and select all documents
-Assign the patinet's name to the documents as if you were filing a single lab for the patinets
-File the combined PDF (progress notes and demographics) in the patient's chart under the "other" heading as "progress notes and demographics" or something similar.
You have now just placed all of the patients AC progress notes in the patient's imported items folder. By remembering the patient's ID, you can now access the Imported items folder in the Amazing Charts program files: Inside the imported items folder there is a separate folder for each patient numbered sequentially by their chart ID number. You simply find the patient's ID folder, double click it, and you should see all of the patient's imported PDF's including one entitled progress notes and demographics.
-You can now burn this folder to a CD ROM or combine the contents of the folder into a huge PDF that can then be faxed to an insurance companies toll free fax number using a hard wired fax line and computer.


Again thanks to everybody for their great input.

Mikael,

Hi. Didn't know you had UpDox. Pretty cool program. I met Andrew Barbash a few weeks ago. He is quite a person.

I completely blew it. I have no idea why I just didn't use the Adobe print driver to print the chart to the ImportedItems folder instead of HTML. You are right, it does format horribly. Sorry about that. So, change step 6 to print to pdf instead of export to HTML

Glad you got it straightened out.