Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Jonathan Bertman

Spoke at length with are once fearless leader last night (11/5/20). We discussed the future of EMRs, telehealth, Zoom; etc.

It was a great discussion taking me back to the old days of AC.

Jon asked that I reach out to all those he knows from the past and were instrumental in the development of AC. He praises the Harris Company but still misses AC and everyone. And, I miss kind capitalism.

He may make a guest appearance on the board. I gave him the addy, and may do so. If so, I am sure many of you will post. And, that is not leaving out the "newbies." It is a fascinating story of how Jon learned coding and Access and, as a family practitioner spent his evenings for many months developing AC. The cool thing is that in the beginning while sticking to the premise of very few clicks (Jon Schreiber's auto-sig) it was the fastest by far of ALL the EMRs.

Many of us (Jon, John, Koby, Gene, Wendell, jimmie, Wayne and Leslie -- still hanging in there as a top poster) rode along the ride to work with Jon to get the project going. Sometimes there were some interesting bug and we all needed a can of RAID on the ready. But, Jon always fixed these quickly.

Anyway, I am sure I have left many out. I apologize. No coffee yet.

Hi Bert and everyone,

No, I am a relative newcomer to Amazing Charts. I started this practice in 2005, and used Amazing Charts from day one. I believe Amazing Charts was version 2 at that time.

I never did much with the user board until about 2011, one of the Amazing Charts updates (?6.09?) caused very significant slowness in anything involving medications or prescribing. I think that was also around the time that Sandeep was getting involved, and after two weeks of hell he actually figured out that disabling hardware acceleration was a good work around.

I did meet Jon Bertram once, briefly, I think it was at a PriMed meeting, Baltimore or Pittsburgh.

I would love to have Jon post on this board!

Gene

Hello,

I never met Jon Bertman and got started with AC shortly before the sale of AC to PriMed, so missed out on the time when Jon Bertman was active on the user board. It would be great to hear from him though!!!!

I think I can make it happen. Jonathan is a legend. FP physician by day, learning coding and designing AC at night. And, then letting a guinea pig try it for $250 a year. Oh yeah, not to brag, but I must be part guinea pig.

Remember the days of emailing Jon directly with bug issues, that was great service.
A Jon story: at a PriMed in Boston some years ago Jon was in the Amazing Charts Booth on the display floor I decided to go up to him and raz him about an issue(think it was the poor/nonfunctional database merge feature)
He got white as a sheet as I started my shtick about 'that useless function and what was he going to do about it' he quickly pulled me aside....turns out the PriMed brass was in the booth at the same time and Jon was finalizing the deal with them. No harm, no foul.

I purchased AC in 2005 also. I remember directly communicating with him via email. All the useless features required by CMS and insurance companies for data mining has "ruined" the product. With each new version there are more bugs and issues.
Miss those old days of having a simple product and a very receptive and helpful owner and support!

Hi koby,

Epic story!

Gene

I never met Bertman and have never been a member of the "inner circle" of his community, but I do recall hearing whispers - one directly from a tech rep at AC that will remain nameless - about Bertman being quite ...... CONCERNED...... that I was in his database "spelunking around" and how the hell did I get in there to begin with and what did I think I was doing etc. etc.

Yeah, posting that SQL code on the forum back in the day apparently caught some attention.

Good times!

James

I had the privilege of meeting and working with Jon on a number of occasions.

I bought AC before I moved into my own office. I had checked out other programs but AC stood out (this was version 1). I emailed him questions and he answered. That did it, it, I was hooked. It was another 6 months before I used it on more than just a laptop because I was renting space in another MD's office. Like everyone else he would make changes to things I emailed with problems. It was wonderful.

Later on we met at Pri-Med. We've had long communications about what was good and bad in the program. I learned a lot from him. (but I still can't really code, not that he tried to teach me that)

He's a fascinating person and very engaging. I hope he does chime in on the board. He usually has very inciteful things to add.

I am hoping. Let's make this a long thread.

I did promise him his own forum. And, that's saying something. I had it down to Ruben or me. I was definitely going to win that one.

Another voice to chime in here. We started using AC in late 2002 (version 1?) and were in regular email correspondence with Jon (sending him bug reports) for quite some time before and after we set up our new practice in March of 2003. We wondered how he possibly had the time to work as a clinician and do the coding, etc. Perhaps he did not do both concurrently. We were sorry to hear that he had sold AC, but of course it was understandable.