Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Going Paperless?

Hi All,

We are continuing to move towards going fully paperless. One of the nice things about paper, however, is how you can look at two things side by side. This is difficult to replicate on the computer because you have to resize and move a bunch of windows around.

One major issue I see, though, is how sometimes we want to look at an imported item in a patient's chart AND at their encounter or demographics screen at the same time. Right now you have to keep clicking between the two tabs which is not useful especially if there's a lot of information you're trying to remember (Ex: an insurance card number, or some lab values). Does anybody know of a way to open an imported item in another window without having to save the file somewhere on your computer, find the file and then open it as a PDF?

Thanks,

Samantha

Just right click on the imported item and open in default application and it will open in a separate window.

What Joel says is true, but there can be an issue with the amount of room on a screen. I think some practices that re really "in to" it have two monitors so they can spread things out.

The imported items is the easy part if the item is in a PDF format because what Joel says works since the item is now open in Acrobat and not in AC. However, I am frequently made nuts by trying to write a letter, look at the last note, and the last lab. AC is not especially good about letting you "take the chart apart" within the AC app itself and look at different parts simultaneously.

Get 2 monitors, even 3 if you have the space. It will seriously increase productivity. When I did some shuffling in the office and one of the staff had to use just 1 monitor for a while, she complained she couldn't get anything done.

I use 3 monitors at my private desk..not a big techy, but had to replace my video card and power supply on my desktop HP to do it. I like it.

Thanks for the suggestion of getting two monitors. I am thinking we are definitely going to go that route, or have one monitor and one tablet.

Does anybody have any recommendations for tablet PC's????

Also, maybe they changed this in later versions of Adobe acrobat, but when I try to right-click on an imported item, there is no option to "open in default program". Any thoughts???

Thanks again,

Sam

Oh come on!!! You all need to quit your whining!!!! Try getting anything done using Epic where every item you need requires opening a new screen.

And the Imported Items in AC is well-worth the wait to open. In Epic, I have to go to a different tab for each category (lab, imaging, etc), the imports cannot be organized by subject and the item opens extremely slowly and defaults to open at 150% which you cannot read, takes forever to scroll down the page and is nearly useless.

Sam,

As Jim[mie] has documented at length, a Chromebook 14"would be an excellent alternative for a second device.

OK, Leslie... let me add my whine.

20 years ago, using a still currently available database engine, I built a program to manage test results from a small related company I started. I am no software engineer. It was not any "Amazing Journey". It was just me, getting up at 4:30 every morning for several months and chewing through a bunch of manuals. That same program is still in use. As of today, it has 107,400 test results linked to about 10,000 employees. I can access any test result on any employee and have it displayed before my finger has lifted from the "enter" key. I can easily create a new screen to show data from any of the 30 or so fields from each of the test, employee, or employer tables. So, I cannot for the life of me understand why it takes 20 seconds to display a lab test for one of 5,000 patients each of whom may have 20 lab tests, and it is impossible to see commonly used data from two or more tables simultaneously.

Yes, it could be worse. But compared to what is possible, AC is really a terrible database program.

And, sorry Sam for the mini-hijack. I'm not sure about your problem with Acrobat, the latest version seems to be working OK for me. Hopefully one of the wizards here will address this. Do you have more than one version on your computer? I had some issues when I installed the full paid version of Acrobat and AC got confused about which program to run.

Actually, David, if you recall I was one of the loudest to whine about the Imported Items when I was using AC My how I have changed!