I have become inspired by my new Lenovo X60 tablet PC. I want to recycle every piece of paper in my life and make it all electronic.
I recently made the decision that I want our office to go paperless. This is a promise made by computers 30 years ago that still has not taken place. This week, the city of San Diego sent us large packet on how to continue with recycling. It appears that our land fills are almost full, and when they are trash will become infinitely more expensive to deal with in San Diego.
Also by making everything electronic there should be less repitition of entry of information, which will make it easier to keep the 100% error free bookkeeping we aim for with patient records and billing.
I started my search with our current software, Medisoft. It appears though that Medisoft has been bought by another company, and it seems that other company may have been bought or is in the process of being bought by another company. When I called them this week, I was unable to get a hold of a person, and did not recive a call back, so I continues my search elsewhere.
Last night I worked from one of my favorite San Diego resteraunts, In and Out, and then later from the Star Bucks on Convoy, next to Comp USA. (Props to Comp USA again for changing my hard drive last month, when I almost lost a big chunk of my data, and yes I had backed it up!)
What I am looking for is a solution where I can utalize these new amazing tablet PC’s by Lenovo. I am absolutely thrilled with this thing since I got it. You can enter data right onto the screen with the pen that it comes with. This means that the patients, myself, and the staff can enter all of the info into the tablet, and then have it all go straight into the billing and records, saving all other data entry and filing. Everything would be caught up imediately, as soon as it was entered, or within a few seconds.
The hardware now exists for this to work easily. This is also an important step toward us being able to open the super efficient chiropractic offices here in San Diego that I want to. I am having difficulty finding the software. The software companies I have seen so far seem to make two or three different packages. One for scheduling, one for billing, and one for Electronic Medical Records. What I am looking for is a seemless solution that does all three. I am going to document in this blog my quest to make our San Diego chiropractic office paperless. It also has to be highly reliable, and I have heard and seen plenty of software that did not have very many users that was not reliable and crashed. For this kind of data the tolerance for error is 0.
My fear is that at the end of this in a week or two I will be talking about the compromise I came up with! So software writers, please read this, and make us a great solution.
Check back, and I will tell you what I find.
Added Note
This e-mail was sent to me from Tina Maxwell and has been edited. I do not know Tina, so can not vouch for her or not.
I too have been reviewing many options for a paperless office and it seems as if the more I research, the more confusing it can be. I hear great things from the sales people but I haven’t yet found the system that fits me the way I would like. I will be looking at Medisoft today with an in office demo. Have you looked any further on what would work best in a Chirpractor’s office for total integration? I’m leaning towards Eclipse and some of their options.
So far I was unable to find an EMR system that worked faster than a well designed paper system. I found that a well designed sheet with the objective findings that I look for where I can simply circle what findings I found works great, with a way to modify it at each re-exam.
Then for daily visits we have a sheet where I can mark quickly what I found, and what I did that day.
I have modified the forms over and over again, until it represents the way I think, and what I do most of the time.
It did help to have a second terminal in the treatment area, where my staff can enter the charges right after I do the service.
It has also been helpful that the patient fills out a body diagram with pain and symptoms and a 1-10 scale.
We have found it essential to have good people to work with who are experts in Medisoft. For a fee they can make custom reports to get the data you need, and also help you learn how to do the things you get confused on. Going in knowing that we would pay a fair amount for training after purchase, then Medisoft was a great choice for our office.