Home Forums Discussions General Discussion New doctor joining me

New doctor joining the office. We will share some expenses and staff but really will have two separate practices. She will use AC. Do I just add her as a separate provider in the admin section? Will her patients be kept separate from mine so she can run searches, do meaningful use, etc? If we ever decided to go separate ways would we be able to each extract our electronic records?

It sounds like you are not absorbing this doctor into your practice.I would recommend you keep her as a 'box within a box'. She can get her own computer and you could give the receptionist a second screen for scheduling this doctor. Then she will have separate records and can leave when desired without difficulty.

May I contribute? I think that you can and maybe should co-mingle patients between the providers, especially if the only downside is the potential for a rift in the future. On the demographics tab, preferred provider is a field box with drop-down menu. So long as the information is input accurately (meaning you have competent staff) then sorting between providers is easily done with the report module.

It may be difficult or impossible to separate the patients later. Further, there may be argument about who owns a patient seen by both. Having separate patients is a good idea of the businesses are separate.

There are a number of different issues here.
1) I would assume she has a different tax ID. Thus if you co-mingle patients it would be difficult to separeate charges based on one doc.
2) I think AC requires a different license for a diffent tax ID/practice name.
3)If a rift develops, she would have access to your patient records and vice versa if both of you have a copy of AC.

You could set up another copy of AC with a different database.
Use a different Windows login that has AC that points to her database and both of you are separated.

If you decide to merge down the line, it may be possible to find someone to merge your databases. My understanding it is possible but isn't endorsed by AC.

I agree with Wendell, there are a number of issues here. It also depends on the agreement you have. Is this doctor bringing their own practice but sharing expenses? Is this doctor seeing your patients only?

If the doctor wants to do her own MU, then she will be using her own Tax ID. It would be easier with a separate database and their own patients. You may want to consult with an attorney.

For a number of reasons outline previously, I would run a different DB. There are some efficiencies as the staff will be familiar with the software, and you can use any number of tools to setup VMs on those machines where there will shared staff working.

Either merging or splitting databases is pretty standard work, just time consuming and therefore expensive.

Sorry to all above that have disagreed with my suggestion. The point I addressed was solely to respond to the question relating to AC use and not to business strategy. The question was posed by SantabarbaraIM was "Will her patients be kept separate from mine so she can run searches, do meaningful use, etc?"

AC is completely capable of allowing two clinicians, whether partnered or co-existing, to maintain separate entities, as said previously, with proper use of demographic fields.

If you choose to have two seperate practices. it is very difficult to join two AC practices into one (just in case you decide to become partners) at later date.

Thank you for all the thoughtful responses. My main concerns are not around a tug-of-war over charts or the legal issues. I am not terribly keen in the idea of requiring staff (who we share) have to log in and out of different user profiles to access two different AC databases.

As pointed out by GNicoll, it looks fairly straight forward to run reports including Meaningful Use reports by physician. So sharing a database looks like the way to go for us. The new doc will be billing under her own Tax ID number though so I will need to make sure that doesn't create a problem. Anyone have any experience with that?

Mike,

The reports function in Amazing Charts is flawed. Although it looks straight forward, it doesn't always work. There are known bugs.

I don't believe you can run any reports specifically by provider with AC (unless someone here knows differently) You can't even run a report asking for anyone with a HgbA1C > 6.5.

It wouldn't mean necessarily logging in and out, or switching, you could run two independent connections at the same time using either a virtual machine (built-in to Win7) or via VirtualBox, or you could stay in the second DB via LMI or comparable.

As Indy says, running a virtual machine on your desktop will allow you to switch between two different AC databases with a mouse click. There are several discussions on this topic: here and here .