Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Questions re transition to eRx and EMR

Our practice will probably transition to EMR sometime next spring/summer. In the interim we are may give electronic prescribing another try. If our EMR choice is eventually AC, do you think it matters much who we choose now for eRx?
Also, what hardware setups are practices using (or wish they were) with AC?
Vance

If you want stand alone ERx, why not use the free Allscripts product? ERX NOW
It works very well, and I still miss some of its features.

Newcrops (the AC ERx module) is clunkier.

Once again Newcrop had a hiccup and scripts were delayed at 1400 eastern time 12/5/11. This is (I think) the 3rd time in 2 months.

Vance:
A few things I learned. Dont underpower your hardware and dont go wireless. A good quadcore will do. I went overkill and got a quadcore with a solid state drive and hardwired 3 exam rooms to it (need to get a faster router) and dont scrimp on video cards, they are cheap. Get at least 8gb of ram and run a good antivirus (I run both a hardware and software firewall). Also - get good internet connectivity....speed is important, but reliability is even more important. Backup everything in at least 2 spots, 1 offsite - I use carbonite. If internet service goes in and out it plays havoc with ERX programs...just my 2 cents...

Another thing to consider is more expensive, but consider starting AC January - have computer for front desk and ones for docs wherever you want them to eRx. Have staff start entering demographics as pt schedule and start entering in AC for scrips, demographics and scheduling. Then next summer you will have a good start on scrips, etc.

Hi Vance,


Welcome to the board. As far as this question, it is probably the 3rd or 4th most asked question on here. You may want to search a bit. Plus, the question as stated is kind of like asking what car I should drive. There are many variables that dictate what type of hardware.

You will find, that there are almost as many different setups as there are practices. And, then there is the never ending battle of peer to peer vs client/server.

So, you may want to look into it first and figure out a few things such as do you need wireless or wired. Do you want a server or not. How much technical know how do you have, etc.

Good luck.

Is the wireless issue one of reliability?

Thanks for the responses. Does AC work on tablet computers?

For our two MD practice we have 3 exam rooms each, with a shared treatment room. So it sounds like we would have a computer in each room, as well as one at 2 or 3 nurses' stations.

More research.
Vance

There are some prior comments about tablets here. I have also used the Motion Computing C5 tablet successfully with AC, although the 10" screen is small, and pen input is slow compared to a keyboard. To view the entire AC window, the screen resolution on your tablet must be 1024 x 768 or higher.