Home Forums Thread Like Summary - Closing up shop

My wife, a Family Physician, and I, her Office Manager, are closing our practice after 20 years (the usual reasons; ever-increasing prior auths, referral and procedural roadblocks imposed by insurance companies necessitate hiring another employee, and we can't afford that). She will work for a corporate entity for a couple of years (she has to learn Allscripts initially, and then the organization is supposed to transition to Epic next autumn) and then plans to retire. Fortunately, she'll still be in the same town, so many of her patients will follow her to the new practice.

I have been taking care of my aging father-in-law and my mother, so my retirement from office management frees up more of my time.

I'd like to thank the people who have maintained this board, and thanks to the many who have helped us over the years (we've used A. C. since the beta for version 1).
We wish everyone the best of luck in the future!

Kurt

Best of Luck to you and the wife. Feel free to pop in on the forum here and there to say hello.

JamesNT

It is very sad to me to see the ranks of independent physicians depleting. Sue and I closed the office at the end of 2022, and we are struggling with forwarding records and tying up loose ends for people who are having trouble finding a new "PCP".

So far, we are very happy with the ability to print or send records from Amazing Charts in a reasonable format and with the ability to control what we send, tailored to each forwarded chart. It's a little labor intensive, but the result is a meaningful, hopefully useful record and not the overwhelming data dumps we have received from some practices.

Amazing charts may be unique among EMRs in allowing us to continue using the program (for record storage) after we stop paying the annual maintenance fee. I am trusting my server to hold up for another 7-10 years to meet the requirement for record storage. I have some computers around the place that are still perfectly useable after >15 years, so hopefully that is a realistic expectation. Amazing Charts Guardian Angel has assured me that if the server fails, they will help me reconstruct a new one from backups -- they claim they are intending to stay in business for the indefinite future, and hopefully that is realistic as well.

A colleague was quoted an estimate of $20,000+ for physical records maintenance for 10 years (he has only paper records, no EMR). That would be really painful.

What Guardian Angel wouldn't tell me was whether I could make a backup image of the server and run that as a virtual machine in a new server box without having to get registration codes for a new server from AC. There has been a lot of talk on this board of "virtualization" but I have never actually tried it. Just using a 2016 Microsoft Server Essentials which so far has done the job.

Tomastoria,

If given a copy of your database and imported items, I can convert all that data to one PDF per patient for a modest fee. That way should your server fail (which is a real possibility in 7 - 10 years), you'll still have the PDF files to hand out. In fact, you may forget about your server by then because handing out PDF files is easier than logging on to a server and printing paper copies.

I'll DM you the details.

James

Well, about one month in, my wife is gradually getting used to using Allscripts. But it is obviously not designed for typists, as much of it is point and click. The layout of AC was a lot less complicated, but the most difficult thing now are the dozen or so logins and passwords and 2-factor authentications. It seems every function outside of the EMR uses a different application, and mostly through a web browser interface. Very cumbersome! The powers that be did not want to import any data into their EMR, so there is a LOT of catch-up data entry for existing patients. A nuisance, and very time consuming.

I'm getting the picture that there is nothing unique about my situation -- and given the fact that if we live long enough, we will get too old to keep practicing medicine! I previously thought that being a doctor, I could escape that fate -- but guess what? NOT.

The next best thing is to age gracefully and quit in time --dying in one's boots sounds idyllic -- but it isn't fair to the patients if you do it on purpose. (like that morbid joke about my grandfather dying peacefully while the other people in the car were screaming). These days no one wants to step into an existing practice, so at some point there has to be an arbitrary decision to close the practice.

Here's where Amazing Charts shines: we own the data, and the program will continue working even if we don't pay any more to AC when the office closes. 12 years of records will back up on a thumb drive and can be accessed even if the server fails -- so maintaining custody of records is relatively easy compared with maintaing custody of all the paper charts. (we so far have paid over$1500 to shred the last 7 years of paper records -- one of the practice partners refused to deal with EHR, so we had duplicate paper records) and probably are looking at another $500 or so before we are done.) I don't think that very many other EHR's out there have that flexibility of dealing with historical records.

Seems like a splitting maul would make short work of a hard drive and recovery would be essentially impossible (except in a movie)

@James,

Would a Sig Sauer 9mm be good enough? I already have two of those. Since I have two, would you suggest just emptying both magazines at the same time Eastwood style?

Motorcycle accident? Boating accident? One that results in the loss of multiple guns?

Maybe sticking to IT is safest? Just a thought....