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I have been using a trial version of AmazingCharts for about 3 weeks. I am convinced it will work well in my current office. Does anyone have a premade powerpoint presentation to convince a skeptical office staff of the benefits of EMR in general and AmazingCharts in particular?

Frank

Jon showed one at the User Conference this weekend. Maybe he has one for lend?

Have you looked at all the little instructional videos Jon posted on the website?

Actually, I think just loading it up and trying it in an off hour might convince them. The scheduling program is very good. You can easily find next appointment scheduled and change with a breeze.

Once they have played with it for a while, I think they will be impressed.

It is certainly important to get the staff sold on the idea. We began by doing just the filing. This got the demographics loaded, and allowed people to navigate about and play with it WITHOUT the pressure of trying to use it 'real time' with patients waiting. Frank where are you located?

My staff was resistant, so we actually just used it for scheduling and inter-office memos for a while, *on their end*.

Meanwhile, I was doing notes on AC. I printed them out at the end of the day, and they filed them, just like our old transcription, only without the 2-week lag time, and with each day's charts all in the same purple plastic tub.

Soon, when they asked questions about a patient, and I knew I had seen them, I would suggest that they bring up the last note, instead of hunting down the chart. That didn't take much convincing.

Also, when people would call for refills, I would show them how to reprint the Rxs I had written at the last visit, instead of writing them out by hand.

Soon, they wanted to enter all the patient's meds in at each visit and prescribe all meds via Amazing Charts.

The other thing they really got into was the Rolodex. They started filling it up with all their numbers.

And, they actually liked the form letters in the letter writer and the fact that the printed page came out with the patient's address. They figured out how to copy and paste that info into Word's envelope printer, and they were off to the races.

I basically showed them every neat feature that they could definitely percieve as an advantage. Soon, they started looking around on their own and asking to try things. They liked looking back to see what my last Plan was, and how long since the last visit.

+1 Let them try it a piece at a time. We also printed the visits and filed the paper in the old chart. Worked like a charm. Everyone had abandoned the paper chart within a month.

Just load the puppy on a few P2P computers and create one or two false patients. Now your staff can play to their hearts delight without having to worry about making real mistakes in a real patient's chart that can't be undone.

This should free them mentally and allow them to feel calmer and looser as the point and click their way around the thing. AC is so easy to get the basics of. There are a few neat not so obvious features to, the thing has a decent amount of power too.

But yet it is easy to self learn and that is one of it's strongest selling points. No big expensive, pay for the vendor's staff to live it large on your dime so they will come to your office and teach your staff how to do their job the way the software wants them too. Instead AC is designed to kind of work the way we all just naturally work and think. I've been known to call AC the QuickBooks of EMR's. It's just what you want and need without a whole bunch of extra garbage that gets in the way. And if you read the threads keeping this important aspect of AC is something most users conveyed to Jon this weekend it seems, and more importantly they seem to feel he really got the message which is great... And that in and of itself is a great part of AC... The owner takes suggestions from the audience... I'll buy that for a dollar!

As they used to say in the old Alka-Selzter ad, tell your staff to: "Try it, you'll like it"... Good luck.

OK, ready for this Frank.
At my last practice in 2003, I was working with this other physician. I had looked at about 30 EMRs online and saw ten in person and demoed about ten.

I looked at AC on a Friday, played with it over the weekend, installed it on the entire network on Sunday and trained the staff to use it on Monday. Printed out progress notes for two weeks, then went paperless.

I think it's good for your staff to be comfortable with it, but ultimately, it's what works for you. And, sure one could say if they aren't happy with it, it won't be best for you, but they will adjust. And, there is basically NO learning curve with AC.

Good luck and welcome to AC.

I found it really easy to play with the program - started using it for basically doing my dictation and scheduling. Actually used it for a long time just doing notes in the exam room and printing them for the paper charts.

Finally made the leap to paperless and my office manager (aka wife) started scanning everything in. I would recommend doing this faster - still lots of old charts, but since doing this since 8/07 I really don't look back at paper any more. My wife in her spare time scans in old records and has scanned and shredded over 1,000 old charts.

Staff initially found it hard to enter demographics and make appt. but then found out how great it was when someone called and said "I had an appt. in July - when is it ?" compared to the paper appt. calendar. Now we really don't think of any other way. I make almost all followup visits in the exam room - great for routine followup - even set lots of reminders for myself and staff for mammograms, fu labs, almost anything.

The e-mail system is also great - if you show them that and how to attach pt. name for phone messages, etc. your staff will love replacing the sticky notes, pads, etc.

Good luck........

OK, so after using AC for almost 4 years I am now preparing to "go paperless". When I got back from the conference I relayed this goal to my staff. They are still a little frantic about the whole deal so we shall proceed slowly. I remember when we first started scheduling appointments electronically in my PM program. My receptionist (who has been with me for 20 years) refused to give up the old schedule book. If there was a fire drill, the only thing she grabbed before exiting the building was the schedule book (not her purse)!! I had to literally take the book away from her and hide it. I made my first paper only charts for three new patients yesterday and we have agreed to start this way. But they want to still have a dummy chart in the rack that says "scanned" so I guess that will be ok. Before going full-throttle though I still need to check my back-ups, wire a "scanning room" and purchase a SnapScan. But I am making progress!

Leslie

Have you downloaded and installed FAP yet? Or are you thinking about doing "Imported Items" instead? The nice basic ScanSnap 510 is USB, not networked so just set it up near the computer station you want to use it at. But you can't use it TWAIN with imported items I'm pretty sure, so that is why I mention it.

We have simply set up a folder at the front desk the is "Things to be Scanned". Now our new patients fill out their forms, we still copy their insurance card for the moment (although if we wanted to go in the back, I did a test run and it will scan cards straight up, even thick plastic ones). Sometime during the day while I have time I sit down at the scanner (saving my staff, all one of them, filing time) and scan in whatever has collected over the course of half a day or so. If Nancy has reviewed it already, then I simply import it all the way into FAP (She initials those, so I know right away), if not then I leave it in the Watch Box section, where she knows to look for new stuff and knock 'em out.

Now Shel is no longer a file clerk, Nancy is seeing her to be reviewed stuff semi-immediately and she knows where the most recent stuff is, if I haven't scanned it yet, and the folder never gets to full because I am scanning at least once if not twice a day, so just check the paper FAP to be scanned File or the Watch Box in FAP itself. And we no longer have piles of paper building up every where that need to be handled.

Vinny made an interesting comment about the old paper charts (We only have paper for all the CCHIT others have sent us, Labs, reports and old forwarded charts). How much time and money does it really cost to scan all these old paper charts and how often do you really refer to them? For the moment I am not scanning in the old stuff, but instead just staying up on all that comes in day to day and it is wonderful. I many just let those old paper charts sit and collect dust as long as we don't need the space or the cabinets for something else. They're really not harming anybody or hurting us otherwise, so why waste the time and effort getting them all scanned and shreaded?

I say pick your sysem of choice and just go forward from there. You may tweak it just a bit, but once you find what works for you, you will mever look back. Just like the day you cut off that old schedule book and went green with AC only. You will love it. Point click and there are the papers you used to have to look here, there and every where for... Trust me Leslie, just do it. You can thank Bert later.

Thanks for the advertising Paul. I am supposed to meet person to person with Ed tonight to discuss F.A.P. and some of your ideas.

I am located in Colorado Springs. The practice owner works out of the same office as I do, and the staff are impressed with the output. Currently, I am doing a couple of month trial, but so far, I see no reason for the practice not to go ahead.

Frank

Frank -

I have a doctor in my clinic who abhors anything new and anything that isn't paper and he's stated that he really likes the Amazing charts program. I'm all for it and happy to tell anyone and everyone how much I like it. Its not a next gen program, it doesn't have (yet) all the bells and whistles, but it is inexpensive, easy to use, and documents a patient encounter very well. Welcome aboard!

Paul,
I think I will not scan everything in from the old charts. I think I will perhaps scan just the last year or so of labs, radiology, consults, etc. and then store the charts in another room here in my office. I would like to open up my space where the charts are right now because I can use it for something else. If I find I need something from the paper record later, it can then be scanned in. I am counting on a lot of my older patients leaving (one way or another) before I do. Those that are still left when I decide to call it quits I may then scan the rest of their paper charts into one big folder and store it somewhere on my server which I can keep at home (or in my coffin as I alluded in an earlier post).

Leslie

Leslie:

I did not scan any old notes. The first time I saw a patient with AC, I had them fill out a history form, and I Dragon-dictated that, supplemented by a quick audit of their chart. I find that I never look through the progress notes again after that, if I feel that I do a thorough job.

For the rest, I had not decided to scan and shred at the time, though I would now. So, I tried to come up with guidelines that untrained staff could follow and get it right MOST of the time, to save me from MOST of the old chart-pulling.

I told my staff to scan ALL x-rays and EKGs, because they are few, and I didn't want my staff to exclude their only chest x-ray or EKG from two years ago, that I need for comparison today.

Lab is a little tougher. If they only had a few sheets, I would scan it all, no matter how old, because it tells me how long it has been since it was checked, and again it provides some basis for comparison. If it is someone who gets lab checked all the time, I would not want to go back as far, maybe just as far as the last off-beat lab they got, the SPEP or serum gliadin, when I was really reaching for a diagnosis. It is difficult to provide untrained staff with that kind of training or discretion.

A practical limit on lab scanned might be the number of pages which fit comfortably into your scanner without jamming.

Congratulations Leslie!

Let us know how it goes.
I estimate an average hour per day saved since Bert convinced me to complete the chart in the room with each patient.

Jim