Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Considering a new EMR

Okay so some of you know that i come on this forum and post a lot in short periods of time and then i disappear for a while. A lot of crazy goings on with family medical issues over the summer and such...but lately i am getting frustrated with basic things that AC won't give us.


Things such as being able to just let each other know where a patient is in the office (waiting room , xray room, lab, procedure room, or which exam room).. This seems so simple...it is ridiculous that i need to use borg chat or something else to have us communicate about this that should be a basic part of an emr these days.

sorry for the vents but so many little things are annoying...someone talk me off the ledge?

Ketan

Sorry to hear about your home issues, but yes, I want you to get off the ledge. I am sending Wendell over right now.

I am one to talk, but you have to remember with 8,000 customers, there are a lot of "A lot of things are annoying and that shout be a basic part of an emr."

I sentence you to one week of using Centricity followed by one week of Epic. Just PM Leslie about the latter.

It can be very frustrating waiting for some things that seem so simple. In the many years I have been using AC, I have seen great solutions to problems I didn't know existed and problems that are extremely aggravating go untouched (spelling.)

It can be very frustrating when the answers seem obvious but they are not activated upon but eventually things will change. Having used a Cerner system for years, I learned to accept things the AC community would not begin to entertain. I'm sure Centricity and Epic are equally as flawed. Only it's a lot easier to workarounds in the AC system

Using a local IM system is one way to notify the staff. There are a number of them out there. We use BorgChat, which is somewhat archaic but it works. It allows us to interact from the rooms to the front desk and lab easily.

Definitely a minor problem when you compare all the really, really, important things that AC CAN do that others, like Epic cannot. Took me 20 clicks to order a test, then you have to "Associate" each and every thing you do with more clicks. The imported items section of AC is a Godsend when you see how Epic handles it. Again, be careful what you wish for. When an EMR can do everything, it can do nothing!

When I attempt to read through the note of the local hospital employe-ed physicians' office visit created on NextGen, this is what exactly runs through my mind.

The software guy that designs for the urologist, cardiologist, internist, oncologist, pulmonologist, neurologist, cardio-thoracic surgeon has designed a product that everyone can use but no one can.

I will take my "fragmented, patched together" AC/Updox/Up to date/Dragon/Lytec11 system, any day of the week.

Ketan, this does not address your issue, and I only have two exam rooms and one nurse so I can keep track of my patients by just looking or asking my nurse, but it seems there has to be a work around short of disposing of AC.

Hang in there, and listing on the ledge can sometimes be awe-inspiring.

Adding an IM system to Amazing Charts would be thousands of lines of code and the implementation would be non-trivial. This may seem like a simple request, but it's far from it. To be honest, I see this as one of those things AC may never get to since there are third party solutions available that can do the same thing - especially considering:

* MU 2 around the corner (some are already asking about it on the forum)
* Integration with their new PM partner
* Integration with other PM's they promised
* Fixing the disaster that is 6.6.1.

Apologies, but when it comes to software development I call it like I see it. If I were steering the ship at AC, then with everything going on spending 6 months adding an IM system would not even be on my radar.

JamesNT

We use the comments section on the schedule to pass location/check-in info. (e.g. pt has arrived, but filling out paperwork)

p.s. I've used eclinical and allscripts (myway/professional) and I would much rather use AC. IMHO

Thanks for feedback...just was very frustrated yesterday. As for the lines of code and such, I guess it could have been brought in from the beginning. I have a CS background so still think it is pretty easy.

As for the other systems, I have used a lot of stuff. Cerner, epic, nexgen...

I was considering Eclinicalworks ...has anyone used that one at all? I haven't done the demo yet, but was thinking about checking it out.

Andy: definitely an interesting way to work around it...

I demoed eclinicalworks and found that it was pretty good. Mind you, that is from a primary care prospective. The problem is that it is click and hunt dominated. It might take me 50 clicks to do a note, but it was not as BS oriented as some of the other systems. Most docs in the Advocate system have their staff do a lot of it but it still seemed a lot more time intensive than AC.

Andy: I am looking at the comments section and I use that as why the patient is visiting us...because AC draws that right in to the cheif complaint...

Almost went with eClinical before I found AC. Met with Garesh Kumar (the founder) and his team. It's been a few years, but for my solo office it was $42,000 for software and hardware upgrades, 5 days of on-site training (flying the guy out and paying him $500/day while my office came to a standstill), and an anticipated 30% drop in productivity for up to 6 months (their estimate). So happy I didn't go there.
FWIW,
David
FP

Friend of mine has Spring Charts x several years. He is quite happy.Busy Primary care office with two FPs and one pediatrician. Eclinical is a rip off. They are making money on maintenance and training. You go on their forum - whole lot worse than here. You stay there for a while and you will get PMs from some programmers offering to fix things on the side. I guess some of their tech support people are moonlighting, screwing up their own company.

Practice Fusion- Can't beat the price.

Practice Fusion - Can't beat NEVER getting your data back once it's in there.

JamesNT

James, never say never... for the right price, that data is for sale to Big Pharma.

Which is to say the clinician can never have their data back, but anyone else with enough $$$ can buy it in bulk.

Practice Fusion -- Or any "cloud based" EMR:

How do you get image files (PDF, etc.) from all the referring doctors, hospitals, labs, etc. that can't use HL-7 into the medical record? We have some 10GB of "imported items" -- and way more every day. It would take forever to upload and download those files over our relatively slow internet to the "cloud", yet I use them constantly.

I don't understand how the "cloud" can work with anything but locally produced files or HL-7 data.