Ok, can I post here. While I am not a technical guru, I do have a very busy private practice in Family Medicine that is not funded by anyone except myself and what I can generate out of the practice. The purpose of posting real life experiences of people actually in the trenches seeing patients, running businesses on a day to day basis and learning ways to get the most and best out of technology needs more than the constant conversations and back and forth comments about "theoretical" uses.
I recently spent 4 years on a Novell DOS bases EMR of a defunct company and was forced to switch a working program to another vendor (after and extensive 3 year search) due to our wonderful government HIPAA and switching ECS vendors who changed data fields. Being a NON-programmer of source code I could not make the changes to a proprietary system source code to accommodate the data fields change and have gone now without electronic claims (and therefore reimbursement IE: cash flow) for 3 months. Following the extensive search it has been a 3 month project and now I am up and running a completely new system of integrated PM, Scheduler and EMR on Physicians Micro Systems, Practice Partner. While it has bugs. I find work arounds and adapt the program to my needs or I adapt to the quirks and have my staff do the same. All the while seeing patients. What I would appreciate from this list and other like it and in the effect to try and accomplish something is for those on the list to post that they are actually using something on the EMR/PM etc front and successfully and how they have implemented and funded it and what they have found to be "tricks" and "quick improvements" that make quality medical care with an IT flare effective, cost efficient and an improvement over paper. Now prove that to me those on this list! I can use your help and suggestions. Stop the bickering and start being practical! Thanks for letting me say my piece. Sincerely, Alan Falkoff, M.D., D.A.B.F.P. High Ridge Family Practice, LLC Stamford, CT Chief of Dept FP The Stamford Hospital
