Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Final Development Poll

Have one at home could take to work. Last Time i needed it, gas stations could not pump as they had no power so when my ten gallons were out i was done for. Have considered propane, but have not taken the plunge.

We lose power all the time. I used to have a propane generator but that was good for 24 hrs at the most even with a 100 lb tank. Now I have a Northern Lights 8 KW Diesel generator plumbed into the home heating oil tank which I keep fairly full. That would give nearly a month of heat and essential power in moderate cold. Then there is solar, which can do a lot in many areas. The office piggybacks off the hospital system.

I actually have two generators. A big one at home which I could bring into the office and a portable one (which I use while camping) which I could bring in and use long enough to at least get the daily schedules. Living on a farm, we also buy gas and diesel in bulk so I figure I could run for a while. We lose power in the office for a few hours at as time fairly often (the squirrels seem to like running about the transformer) and I just make do. I presume that, in the event of a major catastrophe there would be few patients needing to be seen for follow up problems...they will be consumed by their own outages. Injuries and acute illness I could do without my charts.

Wow. You guys are amazing. My plan is to just cross my fingers and hope everything goes well. At this juncture Doctor would just see patients and write notes on paper and have me scan it all in later.

Speaking of scanning: as I am now knee-deep in importing paper charts into electronic ones I'd like to vote for the "making your own categories" thing.

Then make sure you vote for it.

Bump

Wow, busy week. Anyone know a good (free) converter for .tifs into .pdfs? I would love you forever!

We've been having to learn the local hospital's EMC system and all our staff who'd been wishy-washy about AC are suddenly raving about how great it is. And easy. We're now convincing other practices who participate in this hospital to use AC by having them come to the office and have me show them the system. So far I've been able to answer everyone's questions about anything ever. It's pretty cool. Hopefully if enough people want to use it they'll build an interface for the labs/imaging.

Just google TIF to PDF freeware and you will get a bunch of them.
You can use IRFANVIEW which is free too.
Grenville

I would like to suggest, if it hasn't already, cleaning up the messages and Inbox:

First write a line of code: If Re, then Re (back) again, then delete first Re. (just example -- I don't code). But, having:
Re: Re: Re: Re: causes several issues.

Choose a format: Either LN, FN or FN, LN. It is first initial, last name in the inbox, then LN, FN in the area to the right of Attach, then back to first initial, last name in the Re: field.

Intials are bad, because we have several patients with first names starting with the same letter and the same last name. Especially, in families. Like Donna Smith, Darlene Smith, Donny Smith. All of these come out D. Smith. There are three places for the name. Make them all:

Darlene Smith
Darlene Smith
Darlene Smith

or

Smith, Darlene
Smith, Darlene
Smith, Darlene

Delete the word patient in messages. It is not necessary as they are obviously patients.

Find a way so that all patients are in one column, maybe at the beginning of the subject field. If in last name, it would be easier to sort by name. Ironically, you can sort by From and by Date, but not by the most important field, which is Patient name.

As it is now, if you have a lot of messages in your inbox, the names are all over the place and they use initials. It should be much easier to have the names on the left side of the subject field so you can glance in the Inbox and find patients.

Try not to use this thread for anything other than suggestions/recommendations of what is currently in AC.

Thanks.

Bert,
I agree with your suggestions to clean up the messages portion of AC. In a way I hate to make the comparison, but this is like the letter writer; as it stands, it is functional but could be much improved with a few (simple?) upgrades.

1. Get rid of extra "re:'s": Agreed.

2. Make names consistent: Messages about the same patient show up as "Chart: Donald Duck (03/20/2005)" and "(Patient: D. Duck)". Make the format consistent. "Last name, first name (birthdate)" would likely be best- see #4 below for why.

3. Delete the word "patient": The real redundancy is that it also puts this type of message in parentheses. So either get rid of the word "patient" or the parentheses.

4. "Ironically, you can sort by From and by Date, but not by the most important field, which is Patient name." Well you actually can sort by patient name; if you sort by "subject" it does this, but it sorts them by first name (or first initial). If the format for both patient messages and charts was "Last name, first name", then they would sort alphabetically by last name.

On mine, it seems to only sort by first initial if they are lined up and also same prefix, e.g. Re, Fw. etc.

I think it would be great if you had:

From: Name: Subject: Date

All of the names should be last name, first name and lined up so the program could sort by name. It seems that maybe they have to be lined up. Don't know. But, would still be better.

Maybe we don't even need a Re or Fw, etc. It rarely makes a difference to me as far as whether it is Re vs Fw. It could be like email and if it is sent and hasn't been looked at would either be a certain color or the From field could look new just like in an email.

Charts and reminders have DOBs, while messages do not. Make it consistent.

@Grenville: Thanks!
@Bert: Sorry! *blush*

Messages do have DOBs. It's in the grey bar between your list of messages and where to send new messages to. It has DOB, pt's age, when last seen and by whom. True, you have to click on the message first to get the information but it is there.

Highly agree with the Re:/Fw: etc. Gets redundent.

I thought messages were listed according to time sent? We also use the color coded system here to let doctor know how important a message is. In fact, I'd like to suggest more than 4 colors please. (Can't use white as that's the default for charts of pt's being seen that've been forwarded to MA/Dr.) It'd be nice if we could have one or two more colors for varying degrees of importance. Not highly important, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Also would like more choices who to send messages to rather than one person and a cc, or EVERYONE. Also for a way to set order boxes to default to certain groups or people. (Like Immunizations and lab tests to nursing groupbox.) Would that be possible?

Yes, there is that info on the grey bar with the DOB. Jon and I were referring only to the list of messages in the inbox. Charts have DOBs. Messages do not.

They are orignally sorted by time sent. But, as with anything, e.g. Excel, the advantage of columns is you can click on them and sort via that column. It would be nice to sort by last name only and not first initial. Also the area in the messages inbox is very jarbled and not easily viewed. Look at Outlook. Every column is very neat and only contains one piece of information, each of which can be sorted by. Take a look at From, Subject, Received, Category, Flags. With one click you get every email from Bert, etc. Click on flags and all flagged emailed pop up. Click on categories and all red, orange, blue categories pop up. Click on Received, and you are right back to have emails sorted by date arrived.

I don't have a lot of things in my inbox but some doctors have 100. They may want to find all Smith, J. so clicking on Name would bring all the names up by last name, etc.

Also, there is no way to flag a message after it is sent. You can send with a color, but you can't color after. It would be nice to have a flag system at the right.

Not that it counts....but my vote is to make everything:
Last Name, First Name, DOB.

Messages, imported items, schedule, results pending file, EVERYTHING.

It makes me crazy tryng to overlook the first initial when I am scanning through some list looking for a patient. I don't think any of us mentally search by the first name, we always search by the last name. I always thought this inconsistency of identifiers in AC was sort of flaky. I wish they would get organized. ( Can't you tell I am German?!)

I don't know if you are German, but you are definitely right. Drives me crazy as well.

Ich auch!!
Hopefully all these points will be brought up at the ACUC.

A button for messages..."Send message AND save to chart".

#30

With regards to #26 "Ability to hide/delete actual worded diagnosis when using ICD-9 code" this can already be done. As long as the diagnosis starts with a number sign and ends with the the ICD code in parenthesis followed by a colon, you can change the wording to anything you want.

For example, I recently changed


to


Or does #26 refer to something else?

Now that I've been using AC for a few months, it drives me crazy that I can't tab and choose every option in the demographics window. Using a mouse is inherently slower than keeping my hands on the keyboard and I should be able to tab to every field (currently the mouse MUST be used to select gender) in the order I see them on my screen. The tab order is all over the place, in no apparent logical order.

And in choosing to add a new patient, the cursor should start in either the salutation or last name field. Right now it starts on the "Add New" button and I have to tab through the search fields to start entering a new patient.

This is one of the situations where what my programmer states could be true. And, also why Jon should explain more about code and programming. While you are correct in the order of things, my programmer (who could be wrong) claims it is difficult if not impossible to tabl to a radio button. Not sure. Probably need to Google it.

Besides, shouldn't your receptionist be doing this? Just asking.

There are only two of us, in an office of three, who are using AC and our PM software and AC don't have any type of link/interface. I import patients from the PM software manually, using a CSV file, but occasionally we have to enter the patient directly using the demographics screen. We simply do that ourselves, and only put basic information in AC; just enough to be able to eRx.

We're hoping to beta test the AC PM module when it's available, because we really hate our current PM software, and the other options we're looking at are all expensive.

Would like to select radio buttons by voice or shortcut key

One small change I'd like to see is just to put the patient ID from AC onto the Orders when you print them. I'm assuming this wouldn't be too much trouble to add.

I don't know about other locals, but in NYC space is very very tight and expensive. So, we do have a Quest PC in the lab, but no room for another pc. But the demographic bridge routine Quest uses only works with that ID number. So we'll print orders out for the MAs to use, but then they go and print another demographic page just to get that one piece of data to put in for the bridge. Unless you catch them and have them write it down one a piece of paper. But just adding that to the sheet (hey, everything else is already there) would just make the problems go away.

Bump

Bump

Bert! Missing you here! Feel better!

Thanks Jill. I guess I make it to every other one.

Oh well. Next time I guess.

So from those of you at the ACUC, was there discussion of the many issues raised here? Was there any priority established as to what will be worked on first? Any commitment or timetable discussed for the project?

Given the new updates and all of the added features, would it have been possible to put some of these requests in? I haven't gone through the entire list again.

The poll is from 2/2011. Just bringing it out of the closet to talk about again. You will have to go to page 1 out of 2 to get to the top of the thread.

Bert, I think those issues will be dealt with in V8.

I am not kidding or being sarcastic about that; V7 is reportedly to introduce PM, and not to make other improvements. Additional V6 releases seem to be almost entirely "fixes" rather than major advances. This is in keeping with what has previously been announced.