Home Forums Practicom's Virtual Medical Office

My name is Paul Goldman and I am the Chief Operating Officer of Practicom. I wanted to take this opportunity to briefly explain some of the wonderful features of our product as well as the integrations we have with Amazing Charts. We provide a Personal Health Record to your patients populated automatically from Amazing Charts as well as two-way HIPAA secure messaging to connect you to your patients. We just launched our revolutionary telemedicine platform which allows you to provide consultations to your patients for non-acute care conditions via secure telephone or video-conferencing.

Through our Virtual Medical Office, we provide tools that will not only enhance your office?s efficiency, but also provide new streams of revenue for your practice.

As the Preferred PHR for Amazing Charts, for a limited time only, we are running a special exclusively for Amazing Charts Providers.

If interested in a demonstration or more information on the product or pricing, please contact me directly at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Paul Goldman
Chief Operating Officer
Pgoldman@practicom.com
(954) 306-9961

Paul, I'd like to welcome you to the Amazing Charts Board, and thank you for taking the time to personally address us.

As you know, there has been an increase in discussions recently concerning your product offering. Many people have questions concerning the exact capabilities of your VMO, but little information is generally available for the curious. I have been to your website, and became interested due to the unique pricing structure hinted at there. I have recently received a demonstration of your system. I look forward to further discusions concerning your VMO with you or your staff.

i would be interested in a demonstration and knowing your products capabilities.

I would be interested in hearing from any AC users who are using Practicom.

I have been using for quite some time and getting ready to switch all of my pt to this model and give free access to all of them. For the pt. who use it they love it. AC auto uploads the CCD which includes labs, shots, etc. You have to send imported items manually and I am going to tell pt. I will send those on request and at visits (takes only a minute to do during visit). I think it is great and having talked with Jon at AC he intends on enhancing the CCD.

Are you able to use Practicom to meet your MU Clinical Summaries requirement?

After seeing the pt. it automatically uploads the CCD to the pt. portal and yes this meets the requirements.

Steve,

I decided to go ahead and try Practicom. Do you have any tips regarding the startup process?

John

They gave me a press release and I got my local papers to put in an article - I had collected a lot of e-mails for patients and they sent out an e-mail to them encouraging them to sign up and I just push it hard in the office. I am starting to give them all full access at no charge to them so the issue of payment is a non-issue for them.

Sign yourself up for an account and send some data to it so you can log on and play with it.

I think it will work for you - there are still a few kinks, but overall it works good.

We got Practicom up and running this week. It was very simple--their IT staff did all the work. There was no upfront cost for us to try the program. Some of the features that I really like are:
1. The ability to send patients their CCD, thus meeting the MU requirement for Clinical Summaries.
2. Secure messaging with patients.
3. The ability to securely send a bulk message to all patients. This would be great to let folks know that we'll be away on vacation next week (so get your rx for pain meds, etc this week.)
4. The ability for patients to chart BP's, blood sugars, weights and send the info to us.

I hope that Practicom and AC continue to move forward on integrating the two programs. Apparently, in the next couple of months, using Practicom patients will be able to schedule their own appointments at our office through AC. It would also be great, for example, if Practicom's messaging system were fully integrated into AC so that patient messages would come directly into AC. This would be a great feature.

Hopefully the Practicom prople monitor this,.
I've gotten no response to my request for a demo (signed up through their web site).
I'll try again, but first impressions and all that rot . . .
I like this BB a lot, for just this reason. Good experiences by other AC users will keep me trying when I might have blown off the vendor.

Roger,

I had the same problem with the demo request--I think it goes down the "rabbit hole."

Just contact directly: Alicia Smith, Account Director
Office: 954-306-9964
Email: asmith@practicom.com

She is very helpful and responsive.

John

Thanks, John

Why is the pricing of this product not posted anywhere?

They have two pricing models. You can pay $1000/yr and all your patients can use the system. Or your patients pay $4.99/month for the service. $3.33 of this goes to Practicom and $1.66/m goes to the doctor. Practicom provides the office a Zoom tablet (at no additional charge) to ease the process of signing up patients. They are also in the process of adding features so that the software will include Phreesia-like features and can be used to check-in patients, pay co-pays, give patient questionnaires, etc.

With the patient-pays model, you can sign-up 10 patients for free ("scholarship" patients). This means you can try out the program for free with a small group of patients. This is what we are doing.

Wonder if their software for patient sign in, med hx, etc. will run on IOS?
Have a day one iPad and yet to set up the "new" iPad I just got.

By this, do you mean the first 10 patients don't have to pay their $5/month for, say, 1 to 3 months? Let's you verify that this is something of value to patients and that it works for your practice? Alicia did not mention this to me. But I need to ask her a few more questions concerning the system's functionality. We are really interested in the patient pay model, but I have my hand in just so many things...

Wayne: They gave me 10 "scholarships" to sign 10 patients up for free. I don't know how long it's good for.

Roger: Can't tell you if Practicom works on an iPad. You'd have to ask them.

I was recently told by Alicia that Practicom had merged with another company and would no longer offer the Lite/Premium model for physicians offices. In this model,which was what AC originally hinted at in a newsletter some time ago, patients pay $60/year for full access to the capabilities of the PHR, but there is a Lite version that is free. With the Lite version, they can receive messages from the office, but not send messages to the office.

I inquired as to specifics concerning what items from the CCD was automatically uploaded into Practicom. In the response, Alicia declined to give me any of the information I asked for, but said that they would only offer the new pricing whereby the physician's office pays $1000/year and all patients are premium. I'm not trying to increase our expenses.

What I found interesting concerning my exchanges with Practicom's staff was why they wanted the physician's offices to pay these fees. I was told that the physician's offices were not able to sufficiently get patients to switch from Lite to Premium. Well, this implies that either they weren't attempting to commuicate tothe patients why they should, or that the patients in these practices didn't value the service. Let's think about that second part.

If the patients do not feel that the value of having this information available to them is worth a modest annual fee, why should the physician pay a high fee to provide it to them anyway? I cannot see a PCP, with the low reimbursements already being pushed at them, paying $1000/year to provide the patients with a service they do not value. After all, you can say you value it, but you don't really value it unless you will pay something for it.

I asked for details about what information and capabilities the patient actually gets so that I could discuss the offering with some of our key patients to help me determine if our patient population would value the service. If they valued it, I'm sure we would have had a couple of hundred conversions over the next year or so. I think one of the doctors on this board said that his patients tended to convert. And if they told me "No, Wayne I don't think this is worth it" then I would see no purpose in paying to give it to them anyway.

Guess I'll never know now.

Not even on their website last that I looked.

The physician's office pays $1000/year. They offer to let you pay that as $250 quarterly.

Thanks. Paying that much for the patients to have access while receiving less payments from insurers is not financially feasible. Patients will not pay for copies of their results, they feel entitled to them. I prefer a free patient portal.

I think the reason it is not on their website is that they are re-evaluating their pricing structure and may even offer a couple of options. Hopefully they will sort this out soon; it is obviously an important issue.

I was told in the email that this is the only option.

Over the last month or so, I've been doing "satisfaction surveys" with our patients, both current and new. One of my questions is if they might be willing to pay a modest fee for high end services e.g. patient portal. Responses have been slightly postive to "maybe" implying that it depends on 1) what we mean by "modest" and 2) what is the functionality they receive with said portal. One patient even stated how it would be good to have that accessible when she goes overseas. So I do think a critical mass of patients will pay for it, but you have to show them what it is and you have to make sure that what is offered is what is going to be valued. And you have to actually ask them to do so and offer them a minimal service alternatively. This is how other businesses and industries operate. The formal term is a "Tier Plan."

I have just started testing the Practicom system with a few patients. Patients who are techies like it a lot--but I doubt I have many patients who would be willing to pay for the service.

It's interesting to hear that the payment options have changed. The program as it is at the moment is not worth $1000/yr to me. But Practicom does have the potential of being a valuable addition to AC. A full-fledged portal with integrated messaging and other features would be valuable. What I'd love to see is AC develop their own portal or work with Practicom to fully integrate the two programs. That would be worth $1000/yr.

Catherine, when you referred to a free patient portal, were you referring to Updox?

Yes,we have been using the Updox portal for about a year. Patients love it. They review their CCD and summary of their appt. We send labslips and test results. It's very functional. If I could just get the local physician offices to use it, I could really cut down on mail and faxes.

I don't think she was, since Updox isn't free (to our offices). I believe she was referring to not having to pay for the portal...let patients pay for it assuming they believe that the offering has value.

I look at several reasons for offering extra services to customers, especially if they get it or free.
1) I can't compete unless I offer it.
2) I receive strong operational advantages by offering/having it.
3) Customers flock to me because I offer it, and pay more for my services.
4) Customers just flat out pay me to provide it for them.

I may have missed one or two...its past my bedtime.

Now, does a patient portal fit any of the criteria? Aside from being required for MU?

Catherine:
I've tried using the updox portal and it seems very time consuming for sending ccd's. I printed the ccd to updox, went to updox and sent the document to the patient's portal. That's a lot of clicks/steps. Is there a simpler way to send ccd's through updox?
The thing I like about Practicom is that it can automatically send ccd's.

I'm not sure since I dont' have it yet, but i dont think so. The choices I was examining were Practicom and Updox. They have different uses with some overlap.

Practicom seems geared to be more of what you would think of as a "patient portal" and PHR by design. That's whey they emphasis uploading the CCR. Uploading the CCR is not at important to us as it is to many (at least right now) since we don't do medicare/medicaid so we arent' eligible for MU. Its only of interest to us if it give me a specific advantage. Increased revenue? Increased number of patients? Smoother operations? etc. Their system can be very good for sending the CCR. One problem though, is with the lab results. It will send downloaded labs results from Labcorp automatically, but there is a difficulty with Quest (or so I was told). They have a manual workaround, but I was not informed of when they expected to resolve the problem with reading the Quest results from AC (if ever). But when it does read the lab results, it does not read any note that the doctor added that explains the significance of said results. This must be sent manually to the PHR. It doesn't sound like its hard to do, just another step.

Updox seems to be a system that started out as an interet fax and then a way to manage your faxes with your EMR. So you an manage all of your incoming faxes through Updox, and route them to the provider/import them to a patient's chart quickly. The patient portal appears to be an afterthought. It provides secure messaging. That seems about it. Reportedly, it can make life much easier in a doctors office. They claim appointment requests, but that is just another secure message. Alicia at Practicom said that the upcoming upgrade in Practicom would have a patient scheduler and I believe it would be sync'd with AC's. I believe the software is in beta test.