Home Forums Discussions Coding and Billing My thoughts on Amazing Charts and PM

There have been quite a few posts lately from people wondering what's going on with Amazing Charts and a PM solution. Here are my thoughts.

If you need a PM solution now then you should be looking at PM softwares and medical billing companies now. Period. There are two reasons for this:

* You have no guarantee you will like whatever solution AC comes out with. For some of you, they may be partnering with a PM software you have already tried and did not like. You need some alternatives in case things fall through.

* If and when AC announces their new PM partner, it will take you a minimum of TWO MONTHS to get the system installed, hooked up to AC, get employees trained, and get the 837 file approved by your clearing house (you may even need to change clearing houses which means you have to get credentialed again). If you need a new PM now, then start looking now. By the time you include implementation time, getting AC's PM set up could be 4 - 6 months out for you.

Consider your situation and make the right choice for your business.

JamesNT

Thank you James. I couldn't say it better myself.

Maybe this should be my new signature:

"Saying what everyone else was thinking since 1993!"

JamesNT

JamesNT,

I think it should be Spock. I like your logical skills!!!!!!

I have had AC for 9 years and have been very happy. I would now like to move my outsourced billing to in-house. Does any body have suggestions for a good PM? I am a solo provider. Don't even know where to start. Or does AC's development of a PM system seem near and worth waiting for?

Welcome to the board Julianne!

You are taking on a big project, so good for you. I am very glad "we" did it 13 years ago, but I wouldn't personally try to do it now if I wasn't still happily married. My secret was to have a spouse that made it work then, and keeps it working now.

You are starting a profit center in your business, hopefully the most profitable one you will ever have. It will be worth it if you have the time to make it run right. If you don't have the help I've had, you have to consider if the hope of profit and risk of losing money is worth your time and stress. Consider overlapping both inhouse and outsourced billing with a gradual transition so you don't have to start in the fast lane.

First of all, you need to be or become knowledgeable on this stuff:
http://www.westtnmedicalnews.com/medical-practice-embezzlement-an-ounce-of-prevention-cms-1342
http://www.kareo.com/gettingpaid/20...d-embezzlement-in-your-medical-practice/
http://www.amazon.com/How-Steal-Medical-Practice-prevent/dp/1456593625

You will need to find a clearinghouse, so include that in your research. Batch eligibility is worth it.

Is your computer IT adequate for this? Lot's of them have some experience with some of the PMs, so you might benefit from a switch to a different tech shop. Reliability

If you hire an experienced biller, it won't take long to transition. You might consider choosing your practice management software based on what the biller is used to working with, if it isn't too expensive to hire the biller first.

If you have to train a biller, know that it is only hard if they have to do the coding, which you can do easily. Probably you already do the coding. Anyway, some degree of "analness" and a willingness to get on the phone and hunt down the solution is all they need, as the billing community will train them if they have some humility. Don't hire a biller that never wants to get on the phone to get to the bottom of problems. It is very easy for them to just send out another bad claim.

MEDfx is the chosen PM that will be integrated into AC by next summer. You could start using it now, but I can't find anything about it beyond the website, http://www.medfx.com/ There are no videos on youtube explaining it, no testimonials, and noone on this board or anywhere on the web that I've searched has anything to say about it. It's a big unknown that has had a program from a company that is a few miles from AC. AC has chosen it, so it might be worth waiting for it.

Hopefully, AC will give an update and start giving us more reasons to consider MEDfx, more information and a reason to want to make that leap.

I am personally researching a switch from MediSoft to TotalMD now, as I am hesitant to jump to MEDfx until I can get some confidence in it.

The transition you want to make is doable, but big. Go for it, but try to have everything running well by next June so that you are ready for ICD-10 in October.

Dan,

From what you have researched, how well do you think TotalMD will work with AC? I too am looking for a PM, or at least a straight billing solution.

I am also looking into EZClaims, but so far their interface looks a bit clunky. On top of that, they well hide their cost of the 837 (also known as 5010) claim format. It's an extra $900. I guess if I could get used to their interface and get at least 2 years out of it before needing to upgrade (doubtful due to ICD-10) it would be worth it. Also, there will likely be another hidden cost, since the $1300 total so far only gets you a 1-user license.

Please do tell about your TotalMD findings.

Asutosh

Hi Asutosh,

We have decided to purchase TotalMD and install it over Thanksgiving, but I only have knowledge from research, not experience. My wife watched the videos and demo, and says she wants it. Yes Dear!

James is a resident expert on TotalMD, as I understand he uses it for his billing business, which seems to be high praise.

TotalMD seems to be a worthwhile upgrade if you have MediSoft. For about the same amount of money as it would take for us to get MediSoft ready for ICD-10 when that is available next year, I get a few more features and much better support. It doesn't need Xlink for the interface with AC as MediSoft does.

I can only say that it is a good choice for the next few years for our office since we know MediSoft and we don't want to go thru a big training program to learn something else. We are going to do the client server since we have a lot of users.

I have no idea if it would be best for anyone that isn't coming from our background in MediSoft, but it seems to have an excellent usability that makes our need for training minimal.

My impression is that TotalMD is the kind of program where you are willing to pay for more features, but not excessively.

Maybe someone with experience on TotalMD could pipe up and help us please. James? Pretty Please!

We've been using TotalMD for 2 years and have just upgraded to their 2013 version. We use their EMRlink program to interface directly with AC. There are a few quirks with it but it's working mostly well now. We do have to restart this program once every few days - it just crashes for some reason.

As for the features, we have the advanced network version. We use to have appointment book pro module but I felt that booking appointments in AC is actually more convenient for us since we usually have to check patient's past encounter history before booking anyway.

Billing with TotalMD is going well. We still use paper superbills even though the codes come over from AC directly. I use the paid Availity clearinghouse (was called RealMed) and I love it. All ERAs are stored on there and I can look something up easily.

Thank you Dan and Serene.

Serene, was the EMRlink an extra cost? How well does it work?

I just want to be able to have it import the claims file created by AC and then put it in the 837 (5010) format. If it can do more, like create claims by itself through the link, even better.

Then, I would like to be able to import 835 remits and keep track of patient accounts.

Does it make the 5010 files and import 835 remits?

EMRLink does not cost extra. You just need to have it running on the server computer. Whenever you sign off on an encounter in AC, the diagnosis and CPT codes will automatically go into TotalMD. You have open up totalMD later to create the claim. You can click "create claims" for all codes that do not yet have a claim or you can go to each patient file in TotalMD and create the claim one by one for each encounter. We do the latter.

You can import 835 remits (no extra cost). But we chose to not do that for several reasons. We do get ERAs through Availity but I manually post payments into TotalMD. Since most of our claims are were scrubbed at Availity before going to payers, most of the posting is straightforward. So I don't mind posting manually.

Thanks Serene.

I was more interested in importing the 835s since that would go so much faster than hand posting.

If you click "create claims", won't it produce clean claims for all the encounters that the claims have not been created for? I don't understand why you create all the claims one at a time.

Well, it has to do with the fact that most of our claims are for medicaid and have vaccines. Texas medicaid has a lot of additional things they want on the claim and they want vaccines to be billed a certain way that AC can't do. So we use the paper superbill to go through each claim and make them look the way they're supposed to for medicaid.

For sick visits 99213 and 99214 if we click create claims, then yes, those claims will be clean.

Also, it's faster for us if the biller puts in all the vaccines & admin codes instead of the doctor clicking through those codes when she signs the encounter. So we just have the vaccines circled on the paper superbill and put it in TotalMD during billing.

Thanks again.

Asutosh

I seriously caution against TotalMD. We purchased TotalMD in August 2013 and have already transitioned to Kareo. We purchased TotalMD after 8 years of using another PM (Medtopia) due to company merger with MD Online. I did extensive research on TotalMD and thought the system was very user friendly. Their salesman is very knowledgeable and made the decision easy. We decided to use Apex EDI as the clearinghouse since TotalMD markets a relationship with both Apex EDI and Gateway EDI.

The entire experience has been a nightmare. We have been very satisfied with AC clouds so we decided to purchase TotalMD cloud version. Unfortunately, Nelson (salesman) didn?t explain the limitations of their cloud version. Cloud users do not have autonomy to make changes or request new features. All cloud users get the same features at the same time after the programmers are sure all the bugs are worked out. For example, you can You Tube 2013 new features, but as a cloud user I still don?t have those features when it?s almost 2014. I also paid an additional fee for employee time clock. However, employee time clock doesn?t work for cloud users.

We have encountered numerous interface problems between Apex and TotalMD without resolution. There have been many issues. I?ve spent hours everyday trying to get fairly routine things fixed. Our biggest challenge has been broken eligibility checking feature due to an interface issue between TotalMD and Apex. We still can?t verify insurances in PM after almost 4 months as an active subscriber. TotalMD and Apex initially both blamed each other. Now they both say it?s a known issue that they are working on with no ETA.

Customer service is horrible. We are in Central Time Zone and their support staff isn?t available until 10am CST. They have a small support staff and are very inexperienced. They are very nice but do not follow-up. There are countless times within a 3 month period of someone in support saying they will follow-up with no resolution. The salesman on the other hand is very knowledgeable. Therefore, I eventually started calling him for all support issues.

They do not provide any training material. They offer training at $99/hr. However, there isn?t any training material similar to AC. You are given a blank canvas with the only option to look at a few You Tube videos or pay $99/hr. I wasn?t aware of the fact that the system was a blank canvas until we had already purchased software. Their system is very similar to Medisoft. Therefore, lack of training documents may not affect Medisoft users.

There?s plenty to desire with customer service and interface issues, but our major reason for throwing in the towel is reporting. I can go on-and-on about reporting deficiencies compared to other PMs that made it imperative to change PMs after 3 months. Anyone that has transitioned from one PM to another after 8 years of information knows that it is very labor intensive. However, the gross negligence of TotalMD made it imperative for us to research other PMs and make another transition immediately. We could not wait for AC?.. We started transitioning to Kareo last month and are very pleased with their PM (AC should have chosen Kareo). We intend to discontinue TotalMD this week.

The ability to interface with AC was a major factor in our decision to use TotalMD. After the serious interface issues between TotalMD/Apex, I was afraid to add AC interface into the mix. I would really ask more questions before purchasing TotalMD.

I?m a hospital Pharmacy Directory that helps management my wive?s practice. The TotalMD transition has really forced me to work almost 2 full time jobs. It seems like I?ve been forced to work at a minimum 30hr/wk for the last 3 months. I have been tasked with helping our biller navigate through the many TotalMD challenges. I haven?t experience any of these challenges with Kareo or our previous PM. BEWARE!!!!!

Marcus Spencer, PharmD

Sorry you had such a horrible experience with TotalMD. We don't use the cloud version so I didn't have the problems you had. I'm surprised they can't make change to the could version more frequently. I thought that frequent updates would be one of the benefits of any could PM.

The sever version is not pain free though. There were hiccups that I had to contact support for. I was also very vigilant in following up with the support team via email. So the things that I needed to change got done in the end, sometimes after many weeks.

ERA posting was another issue we encountered. I don?t think the demo really explains that TotalMD and whatever clearinghouse you choose function independently. We receive 75-90% of our payments through EFT/ERA. The goal is to minimize the amount of time the biller has to spend manually posting EOBs. However, our ERA posting time doubled or tripled when we switched to TotalMD. Most PMs have ability to seamlessly interface ERAs into software from clearinghouse without any user manipulation. With TotalMD, your ERAs go to the clearinghouse. Then your biller has to manually download each ERA to a folder on computer before manually importing each ERA into Total MD. This is very time consuming compared to the ERA appearing in a queue in PM by default. This is almost as time consuming as manually posting paper EOBs. Our previous PM and Kareo both have ability to seamlessly interface ERAs into PM. The time that one would save interfacing encounters from AC to TotalMD is greatly made up for with more of a manual payment posting process. My goal is to automate as many processes as possible. I was completely blindsided with TotalMD?s ERA process.

Marcus

Our experience with TotalMD thus far has been considerably better than Keidra's. And, with all due respect to Keidra, I find some of his complaints to be invalid (though not all). In the interest of keeping things fair, I should also point out something we all already know: I'm not a typical end user (queue smart remarks by Indy). I'm clearly one of the most technical persons here and certainly the most knowledgeable about Microsoft Technologies. These things should be taken into consideration when one sees a situation where some user XYZ says they are having issues with some kind of tech and then I come up and say I have no problems at all.

With all that in mind, let's get started.

I agree with Kiedra that TotalMD's sales person, Nelson, is top notch. He did an excellent job demonstrating the product to us and working on price. Because our company has special needs, TotalMD gave us access to a developer. We have literally dozens of custom reports and dozens more automated processes that require direct access to the TotalMD database. TotalMD's database is a bit more complicated than most since it was designed to do Dental, Institutional, and Professional billing (you will see references to "Dentimax" in the literature and the program as you use it). TotalMD also gave us the credentials to access the database directly upon first request - no hassle.

Giving us the database password without any hassle was a surprise to us since we usually have to beg or coerce for such information. Allowing us direct access to their senior developer made us wonder if we were still in our original dimension or had been teleported somewhere much more magical.

Because of my technical expertise, I have not had to call technical support for anything with TotalMD. That being said, not everything has been all roses. There are some issues to take note of such as:

* The TotalMD database design is very complicated. Not as bad as eClincalWorks or that beast known as Centricity, but complicated nonetheless. As noted, this database was designed to bill dental, professional, and Institutional claims.

* The TotalMD database is based on DBISAM which is very different and not as popular as, say, SQL Server. While getting SQL Server tools such as SQL Server Integration Services to work with TotalMD was a bit challenging, it is very doable. Some things to watch out for are how DBISAM handles connections, the fact that it doesn't like null values for certain data types such as Boolean, and is case sensitive.

* The 837 claim generator used by TotalMD is sold separate and by database. If you have only one database (i.e. only one client or you are a single practice that needs only one database) then the extra $400 is not a big deal. But if you are someone like us with 90 clients, which means 90 databases, that $400 becomes a big deal. This doesn't matter to us, however, since we (and when I say "we" I really mean "ME") are writing our own 837 generator for TotalMD. We are doing this because we need to maintain control over the generation of claims files to deal with nuances with various carriers.

In regards to Kiedra's remarks, I do have a few comments:

* TotalMD in the cloud. As I have stated on this forum before, pretty much the only cloud vendor I trust is www.bestforyourpractice.com. The rest just plain suck. Your data gets up there and you can't get it back and/or support is inadequate. If you want someone to host your TotalMD for you, get Indy to do it. The fact that "all cloud users get the same features at the same time after the programmers <allegedly> are sure all the bugs are worked out" is actually a staple of cloud service from any cloud provider. In fact, they all advertise that fact as the number one advantage of the cloud.

* Interfacing. I don't know of any interface between any billing software and EMR or any billing software and clearinghouse that is perfect or works well ---except for the ones I've made with our clients. Each software, billing and EMR, has guidelines and so forth for what they expect to receive and what they will send and that's pretty much about it. There is very little customization and what little there customization there is available is often very expensive. If you want interfacing done right, do it yourself. This user forum is replete with people complaining about some interface with some software.

* Time Zone differences. TotalMD is located in Arizona which means they are Mountain time. It is not feasible to expect every vendor you deal with to be in your time zone. Finding out when support is available should be one of the first questions asked to the sales rep, not one of the last. In regards to the quality of support once you get through to them, I cannot speak to this as I never have had to use support. Again, consider who I am.

* Regarding training, some companies do it the Amazing Charts way which is to post videos online. Others do training by the hour and charge for it. TotalMD does it by the hour, as does AdvancedMD and countless others. Training should, again, be one of the first questions asked and not one of the last.

* Reporting. I cannot speak to reporting. We make our own reports to our needs and as stated previously I have dozens of reports to port over to TotalMD. Yay, me. I'm sure we'll find one or two in TotalMD we can use, if not, that's no skin off our teeth.


I am truly very sorry Kiedra has a poor experience with TotalMD. Some of his issues, such as reporting, are valid. Unfortunately, I also feel most of his issues were avoidable if more discovery had been performed. TotalMD does have a 30 day trial available that should be used before making any decisions.

In regards to Kareo, I have heard many good things about it. However, I would caution Kiedra, or anyone else using an online system, to make sure you can get your data back when you ask for it. And this process should be tested. Just because they give you a bunch of files on a USB stick doesn't mean you can use them. All relationships come to an end. Business Continuity should be given due respect.

JamesNT

James, I recognized myself as Marcus instead of Keidra. We see TotalMD from two different perspectives. I see TotalMD from the perspective of a pharmacist that owns/manages a medical practice that needed to replace a PM within an aggressive timeline. Your perspective comes from a very tech savvy billing software standpoint. I don?t think many AC users share the same resources as you. Most of us look for a turn key product versus purchasing a Corolla and transforming it into a Lexus. I will respond to several of your comments:

*Interfacing. You provided a detailed generalization of software companies. However, my point is to the AVERAGE user without IT expertise TotalMD?s interface with clearinghouses is totally independent. An additional step is required to both submit claims to clearinghouses as well as receive ERAs from clearinghouses. That?s very inefficient compared to other softwares. During demo, my mistake was that I didn?t realize what I didn?t know. Our previous PM of 8 years was a true interface to the point of my not realizing the clearinghouse?s role. We paid one fee to the PM and they managed clearinghouses. That?s what I now have again with Kareo. We use Gateway EDI with Kareo, but all communication is with Kareo. If there?s any issue, we call Kareo and it?s between Kareo and Gateway to fix issue versus us playing as middle man every time there is an issue.

Training: I spoke with TotalMD?s salesman at least 10 times before we decided to purchase software. TotalMD?s software is very user friendly. I was personally trained on all routine functions before I ever purchased software. I even negotiated price reduction as well as downloaded program 30 days for free. However, I was trained on a fully functioning demo and didn?t realize their program was a blank canvas that required the user building everything. It took nearly a month to build necessary queues before I could train staff. While researching program, I noticed training videos for $299 that I was prepared to purchase. However, I was made aware that they no longer sell them. They do not have a user manual. Someone must verbally tell customer everything which is terrible. That?s not common for any company. I didn?t think a question like that was needed. That?s not the AC experience or many other billing software companies. Kareo has an extensive video library, an initial success coach, online user manual, and unlimited support.

30 Day Money Back: I have complained to both Apex and TotalMD about 30 day money back. Transitioning from one software to another is not a 2 week process that allows enough time to evaluate program in 30 days. I didn?t realize the magnitude of software deficiencies until almost 2 months. It takes longer than 30 days to setup many insurances with new clearinghouse. Once insurances are setup with clearinghouse, the process of submitting claims, posting payments, and follow-up takes times to evaluate. 30 Day money back is only feasible if customer is using existing clearinghouse and simply changes PM.


Reporting: The system is such a blank canvas that most reports are not available to customers. There were several times I had to call salesman and ask for reports I saw during demo. The support staff didn?t know what reports I was referring to. Reporting is terrible. TotalMD appeared to have good reporting during demo. However, the salesman was using fictitious information and was very general. I can go into extensive detail of the reporting deficiencies offline for anyone that wants more information.

James, I have read many of your posts. I respect your IT knowledge. I actually evaluated TotalMD after reading one of your posts from this forum. However, I don?t think it?s productive to discredit another?s perspective based on generalizations especially when many of the functions/services you don?t use due to enhanced functionality and other external factors. We do agree on one thing. I could have avoided 2 months of HELL with better fact finding. However, that doesn?t mean the issues aren?t real to the average user. I?ve utilize this forum as a place to gain knowledge of AC for years and I never post. However, I decided to post on this topic so that other lay users would make informed decisions.

Marcus

Marcus,

My apologies for taking so long to reply. It's been busy. And I hope you and yours had a great Thanksgiving. Thank you for the correction of the name you preferred to be called by.

You are quite correct that we both see TotalMD, and probably many other things, from totally different perspectives. Sadly, you are also correct that many AC users do not share the same resources as me. It would be nice if the world had another JamesNT or two or five in it, but it doesn't (queue ego-deflating remark by Indy).

Regarding interfacing and training, you're not wrong. But then again, neither am I. A lot of softwares don't offer free training videos like Amazing Charts does. They see training as another revenue stream so they charge for it. As for interfacing with a clearing house, most softwares will have a list of "compatible" clearing houses, but as far as getting the actual 837 file to the clearing house goes you are on your own. Some will offer an interface to their one "preferred" clearing house, but that's it. Our difference of opinion here is mostly likely from the fact that I have worked with a higher number of softwares than you have which is why I still say you are not wrong. You are quite correct given your experience just as I am quite correct given mine.

In regards to the 30-day money back and training goes, I'm afraid I may have to disagree with you somewhat. From what I'm reading, you actually tried to transition from your old program to TotalMD as part of your evaluation. That was most likely a mistake. You are quite correct in that making a full transition will take quite a bit of time. We are still in the middle of ours and our transition will take almost all of 2014 to finish up. I would have tested the program, gone through some training, evaluated processes, things like that during the 30-days to determine if the program is right for my needs. I would not have tried to take it into production - especially if that meant transitioning over. However, I would still argue on your side that 30 days is a bit short. I'd go for 45 just for the sake of having enough time to kick the proverbial tires.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "blank canvas." Can you elaborate?

I wasn't trying to discredit you. I do, however, think your approach could have been better and you could have saved yourself some grief - and it seems we agree on that a bit. It's important to remember that no PM or EMR software vendor is here to look out for you. They are all here to take your money and once they have it you are ON YOUR OWN. It's up to you and you alone to make sure you thoroughly test the software and make as much of an informed decision as you can before pulling out your wallet.

Otherwise, I think you're a smart guy who unfortunately got caught in the traps involved in trying to find a new PM or EMR software. If there is anything I can do to help you, just ask.

Lastly, you mentioned that you rarely post here. I would ask that you change that position. I have found my dialog with you to be refreshing, your diplomatic skills top notch, and your ability to convey your point-of-view to be excellent. People like you are what's needed to keep people like me in check. You are quite correct when you point out our very different positions - your being the pharmacist that owns/manages the medical practice and mine from the tech-savvy billing center.

What's that old saying? We need more engineers to leave the lab and go to the field and more of those in the field to be in the lab.

JamesNT

I'd personally like to hear some more. DanWatrous - you recently transitioned over to TotalMD. What were your experiences like?

So far, so good, but I haven't even got to first base, which is my bad.

TotalMD has been fine, and I have been impressed with their support. I have been on hold 3 times for 5-10 minutes and twice got thru immediately.

I don't want to convert my MediSoft data to TotalMD until I've got the clearinghouse connection working. It takes a few weeks to start up with GatewayEDI, and I imagine with Apex as well. If you don't have either as your clearinghouse, I would investigate that since they have the best features with TotalMD. We will probably go live 2 Mondays from now since I have a lot of data to convert. Not having one of the preferred clearinghouses set up first is the big mistake I've made that has caused us to delay going live. I think Marcus made a good point about a 30 day trial period being too short. But I don't have any reason to think that choosing TotalMD was a mistake so far.

My staff, after playing with Disney characters we have entered into a virgin practice, feel that it is an upgrade from MediSoft v17 we are using now. Very similar. A few Dentistry features are exposed, but not a problem. We are used to MediSoft so maybe it doesn't take much to please us. We have always had to deal with clearinghouse issues and separate reports, since you get no support directly from MediSoft.

I was naive enough to upgrade my 12 best clients to Win8.1 from Win7 and XP from formatted drives over Thanksgiving weekend. Seven of these clients have not allowed TotalMD to connect to the server, thus all the calls to TotalMD Support over the last few days.

I've learned how to edit a domain, registry, firewalls, permissions, and exclusions. I can now ping other computers and use dos commands, but I basically am seeing how much I don't know. Monday will have a local IT guy, who knows my virtualized server, talk to Mike at TotalMD to hopefully clear up my connection problem. My Win7 and XP clients that were not upgraded installed fine. I really increased my troubles doing clean installs on so many clients. At least I have learned a lot about Win8.1.

Dan,

I feel your pain, having just gone from XP to Win7. There is a significant learning curve when changing OS. It seems that everything becomes increasingly more complex, As you said, eventually, it will all work out. What I learned is that next time I will allow more time and do smaller incremental steps.

That is the lesson I'm learning. Change always takes more time than I think it will. It must be because I'm Virgo and lazy like jimmie. Never believed in that stuff until jimmie said that.

The upgrade urge was like moving to another home and wanting new paint and carpet.

I know that several practices on this board use AC and also Medware.
AC seems to offer an interface (for $#500) so that entering fields in one program transfers to the other -- presumably without effort.

Has anyone used this? Bert, I think you use Medware.

I use Medware. Works well with billing and reports but has a tendency to accept every adjustment on Autopost, so those have to be reviewed carefully. Didn't both with an interface. I pay a little extra so my front office doesn't complain about typing demographics twice. We maintain the minimum demographics needed for billing on Medware and the full demographics on AC, and that why minor incompatibilities don't drive us batty.

Thanks. That is my take as well, but the promise of an interface is, well, promising.

So what's the Total Cost of Ownership with Medware? Single user vs. multi-user? Who do they work with on the billing side: Apex, Gateway?

There is precious little on the net about Medware.

Thanks.

So a sales inquiry phone call to Medware (seems to have evolved to Vitera Healthcare?) led to the following:

- Gave up the first time after about a 30 min hold.
- Left a msg the second time. Someone called back, barely had any knowledge of Medware, transferred me to "right" dept, then got transferred to "righter" dept, then got dropped.

I'll try again, but if reaching sales is this difficult, I shudder at the prospect of getting tech support...

Usually it's the other way around. Getting through to sales is easy. Tech-support is hard.

JamesNT

We will be going live with TotalMD next Monday, so I can't say very much about the program yet. We are doing a very slow installation and confirming we are ready for everything before going live. We have called support 15-20 times, and only once couldn't get through to the general support option. I know several of the techs now, and most have given me their direct extension. I have been very impressed.

Course, I just say I'm calling on behalf of Mr. Summerlin. Works every time!

Several times when support has to "send my problem to the developer" and it's been a while, I send an email to Nelson and he will usually get them to followup with me.

Dan, will you be using the interface with AC?

Hi Serene,

Eventually yes. Maybe next year, but I have no plans for it.

I have a program that handles what we need to communicate to front desk and billers, so would lose some features specific to our practice. We are used to coding procedures with the multilink codes for MediSoft which we would lose if tried to do it all in AC.

We are used to double entry, so I don't see the rush for it.

GoBruins--

Medware started just like AC -- very simple and intuitive, essentially an electronic version of a paper chart.
We have been using it since 1996, and although it has migrated from DOS to Windows, it retains its simplicity. For us, that is good. We are simple minded.

It was originally very inexpensive -- I don't know what it costs now, but support is always good, and it doesn't cost much either. It sold to Sage, and then to something else, so I suppose that sales is pretty confused. The support numbers work fine.

We made all the transitions to the various requirements of Medicare and others for correct billing formats as they occurred, and paired with OfficeAlly, we don't seem to have any problems in billing.

The reports are a little funky, and I don't know of any way to do much in the way of custom reports, or to output the report to anything other than either printer or print screen -- no way to get it into Excel, for example.

But it has served us well, and it works fine with multiple users - so far as I know, for the same price as one user.

I'm still wondering if anyone has tried the MedWare-AC bridge that is advertised on the AC site?

Dan, that's probably a good idea. Most of our problems with TotalMD stem from the interface with AC...

Tomastoria,

Thank you. Others have attested to the simplicity and bulletproof nature of Medware, and that appeals to us. I guess it's just a matter of getting through to them

I'm all for efficiency and streamlining, but my spidey senses tell me that the interface with TotalMD or any other PM package is more trouble than it's worth.

DanWatrous,

Just curious - how goes the TotalMD experiment?

Hi Gianni,

I am still in limbo because of a constipated computer. We started the conversion of practice data late Friday afternoon, but it slowed down and stopped after a few hours. Turns out my C drive partition was totally full. We removed 11 GB, but I couldn't get the conversion to restart. We will try again Thursday afternoon so that we can redo if necessary on Friday. I wish there was a way to keep using your old PM during the conversion, and it would be wonderful if you could run both for a while, in sort of a test drive fashion.

I learned that Friday is not the best time to start a conversion because Monday morning is chaos in the best of times.

Our clearinghouse has been able to receive and template our phony claims from TotalMD, and application for GatewayEDI is in, so hoping there is no delay in payments next week.

My goal was to transition by the end of the year. I trust everything will be stable when new insurance policies for a lot of patients hits the fan on 1-2-14. No complaints about TotalMD.

My biggest stress has been updating all clients to Win 8.1 from XP with clean installs. It is unbelievable all the programs all the staff need to do their jobs. I'm running around solving little unforseen complications so staff can work while seeing patients, so stressful days. I am cheap enough to think that this is fun.

Any update on the TotalMD stuff, Dan?

Hi Gianni,

I'm happy with TotalMD. I think TotalMD has lost money on my purchase however. It turned out I had a lot of problems with the Medisoft data that I didn't know about, which kept us from doing a straight forward conversion on my server. We had to archive everything before a year ago to minimize the problems, ship the data to Phoenix, and the lead developer at TotalMD had to spend a lot of extra time to get the conversion over, around and through all the last year problems. Apparently, MediSoft doesn't keep a tidy transaction table. Sure is nice that the conversion from MediSoft is free. Since a PM is worthless unless your data is credible, the conversion is everything. My impression is that I have been dealing with professionals.

If you have MediSoft, and are going to have to put out a lot of money for ICD-10 anyway, look into TotalMD. If you have a lot of years of MediSoft data, expect delays in the conversion.

And if you have Windows XP Pro on your clients, you might want to upgrade that first.