Home Forums Discussions Feedback and Recommendations Labels for charts

Okay, so before we had AC we had Medical Manager and were able to print patient labels with just a few steps.
We have tried and tried to figure out how to print just a simple Avery 3-1/2" by 1" label with first & last name, DOB, adress, phone # and pt. acct #. Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. I've exported demographics into an excel spreadsheet and it gives me the entire household under one cell. Example: instead of having an individual cell for each of John Smith, Suzie Smith, Michael Smith and Janie Smith (all of whom are related and live in the same household/same address) It just gives me "the smith family" generally just used for mailing general info. We use labels for multiple reasons: Prescriptions, superbills, appt. progress notes, General orders (mammo, ct, mri, labs). I've lived without labels now for about 6 months and am literally about to go CRAZY!!! The time they save me to not have to hand write out the patient's demographics on everything. I'm not the most computer saavy person, but hopefully someone can help? Thank you so much.

Desiree,

This is very easy to do, and I can quickly give you four ways. First, you are using the wrong export function. You should not use the family export which, as you noted, is for entire families. You should export using the demographics function. This will give you a list of all of your patients.

The first way may not completely translate as I use Office 2007. I am sure it can be done in earlier versions, I just can't give you the steps. You simply export the file into the AC folder. I like to then drag it to the desktop. It is easiest if you delete the columns you don't want leaving only the data you mentioned. In 2007, you can then open Access, click on external data, then Excel and use the wizard to make a database. Once you have a database, you will find that Access is much easier to work with and much more powerful. You can then click on Create, Reports, Labels and with a few clicks make thousands of labels which you could use over and over.

The second and probably the best way is to take the same Excel sheet you have tailored to your liking. Save it as a .csv file. For a little less than $100, purchase a DYMO 400 Turbo printer. We have several, and they have all worked for over five years now. You can use a number of different size labels. You open the address book, import the Excel.csv file, choose the layout, then hit import. I just did this for fun and had over 2000 addresses in less than a second which contained Patient ID, DOB, Phone number, First name, Last name and Address. You can then select any name and print it out. It will even give bar codes for mailing, but I guess it would be hard to print DOBs and ID numbers for addresses.

Thirdly, I already have software which utilizes AC. We use it for lab labels, chart labels, etc. But, it doesn't pull out addresses and such.

Fourthly, and I am speaking for my programmer so I can't guarantee it, but my programmer could most likely write a program in 24 hours that would pull all of that information from AC and print it to a label using any label maker.

I would love to hear exactly how you use these labels. I mean don't you print out or fax your prescriptions, etc.?

It can sometimes be helpful to do a quick search to see if the topic has already been talked about.

http://tinyurl.com/5h4cll

Any luck with any of these ideas?

The only thing we are currently utilizing AC for right now is the schedule. We do not e-prescribe (YET!) and are still doing paper charts which is okay for now, but eventually will learn to transfer over to AC, which I'm looking forward to doing. I'm actually going to sit down with the doctor tomorrow afternoon with all 4 of your excellent suggestions (#2 sounds like it's easy enough for even me to figure out) and decide what we're going to do. I will update you for sure.
Bert, thank you for all of your advice.

Let me know how it works out for you or if you have any questions.