Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Forced transition to hospital EMR

I having been using AC since $250 days (9 yrs?). I am employed by a small hospital (10 docs)that uses CPSI. The hospital has decided unilaterally to implement CPSI EMR in the 3 hospital clinics - including mine. They want the ARRA stimulus money, plus feel the oncoming Federal "mandate" for EMR. I am trying to stop this trainwreck (bad EMR), and have them consider AC (price is a big issue). Is anyone using AC on a hospital network? How does it work on a hospital hosted server, with several outlying clinics connected by T1? Is there any connectivity between offices- ability to read my colleagues AC charts? HELP!

Toby Lindsay MD

AC isn't a hospital class EMR. Not meant to connect several outlying clinics. Better suited to small offices. There is a much different set of selection criteria when shopping for a hospital class EMR. Price is a more minor issue when considering those hospital application requirements but they should involve the physicians in the selection criteria. Hope it works out for you.

I would agree with Eric that AC doesn't naturally fit multi-location use; this would be less so if you could use database clustering/replication within SQL-Server for AC, but that last time that I asked they weren't architected for that type of distributed transactions.

A work-around that I suspect will grow in implementation next year with the advent of viable Windows/Android tablets is running a desktop[physical or VM], and connecting to it remotely via LogMeIn. That type of connectivity is much more manageable, and keeps the heavy data flow on the local (Hospital) network. We have seen a marked increase in remote users in the last 6 months within our supported organizations, and we expect that trend to go up 200%-500% next year.

This is one of the things that scares me a little about AC. If certain "experts" are to believed, a larger and larger percentage of providers will be employed by hospitals. In fact, we may ALL end up that way, or perhaps as part of large groups. I know we have heard this before, but if it turns out to be true, we will not be able to continue using AC. Of course that might be the least of our worries at that point.

There are a couple of major upsides I can see of using a unified EHR within a single corporate structure. All the patient's records would be available to everyone immediately. Wouldn't it be nice, Jon, if the surgeon had your ERCP results the same moment you did the procedure rather than having to ask for them, get them and import them? Or if cardiology notes lived seamlessly in their proper chronological place in the chart, and not as an imported PDF file under a separate tab? Or if the current medication list was available to everyone, and changes made by one provider were instantly flagged for all to see?

Secondly, I would love to pass the IT headaches off on to the hospital. Let them worry about servers, networking, backups, upgrades, wireless access, UPS's, printers and everything else that irritates on a nearly daily basis. I could get back to medicine.

I love my independence, and would not trade it to be a slave for Banner for anything. But, if I started that way, I could see a lot of upside to using an admittedly lesser EHR.

Dgrauman,
In theory, it sounds nice to have a community wide single EMR. The problem is in implementation. To access hospital data, we have to go into another CPSI program (to which we have access now), find the data, print it out, then scan it into the system. There is also no electronic faxing.

As far as IT support, our IT dept knows hardware and networking, but nothing about the EMR software.

Is there anyone using AC from a remote server over T1 line? Anyone using AC in a multipractice organization?

JBS (Jon),
I agree w/ you.
If it gets to that point, I will have greater worries than my EMR. I'm riding my "solo doc" pony for as long as it has legs under it and breath in its lungs.....and maybe just a little while longer than that if I can.

From what I have been reading, Adam, "they" are giving us solo docs 5 years. Apparently that is as long as "they" predict we will be able to survive.

Adam, have you been talking with Massive Dynamics?

Darn it Wayne, you are onto my ploy....

Leslie, I would love to see us out live "THEM."

My hospital employer tells me we are going live with CPSI EMR in 4 months -we will be the 70th practice to "use" it. The hospital has not even done a site visit. They think the ARRA stimulus money will pay for this EMR boondoggle. I am going to start a support group for hospital employed former AC users.

Toby I'm sorry you are forced into that situation.
Brian Cotner was a former AC user (BCMD on the message board). He joined a hospital owned practice and had to surrender AC when he left private practice. He posted similar pains a few years ago as he went through that transition. He had left quite an impact here on the boards, as you can see he remains 4th top poster even though his last post was Sept 2009.