The Paperless office Part 2

It took the better part of the first half of last year to get our Accounts Receivables area working the way we wanted it to with the new version of Medisoft. I am sad to report that after extensive study and searching I was unable to come up with an Electronic Medical Records System that worked the way I do. The software documented lots of things that are irrelevant to me, and failed to document the things that are vital to me.

One of the key things was simply that after every 12 visits, we re-check the patients objective findings, and make a graph of the progress. It is of course not a perfect system. It is not weighted as to whether one objective finding is more significant than another one. For instance if the top vertebrae is out of alignment, in my opinion it can cause massive changes to ones neurology, above and below the bottom of the skull. On the other hand a stuck toe joint would count on our system as just as significant.

Also of course I am not a perfect machine, and although I consider myself to be one of the better more conscientious chiropractors I have ever met, mine, and every other doctors ability to use our hands to determine which bones are out of alignment and stuck has some variability to it. For the record, my theory is that chiropractor to chiropractor there is a variance of skill in feeling asymmetry of the spine. There are of course bones that are asymmetrical from side to side that can throw one off. There also is another point that I have never heard brought up from chiropractors, and that is the fact that the greater the distance the bone has become fixed from its central position, the easier it is to feel.

I have discovered this after inviting people to feel their own misalignments and decide for themselves, or by having parents check their children or visa versa. Even for myself, the greater the degree the bone is displaced from its center resting place when it becomes stuck, the more certain I am of the result. As the bone becomes close to being perfect, it is harder to measure the fact that it is out of alignment, and more the fact that the bone simply does not move well.

Back to paperlessness!

After having Reagan who had been with us for half a decade leave and get married. Mazel Toff! (That is congratulations in hebrew) the patient treatment area has suffered in its following up on patients who have fallen off from their ideal treatment plan. As you probably know, we pride ourselves on getting results that often vastly exceed those of other chiropractic offices, so this problem is totally unacceptable. One of the required pieces of getting patients better is that they show up exactly per their treatment plan until they get to their peak recovery.

So after trying to get a few people in to replace Reagan, and so far failing, I have stepped in the past few weeks and taken on the job myself. Many of the patients have been very surprised to hear my voice saying “Hey, didn’t we have a visit scheduled for you today? What’s going on?”

I actually love my patients a lot, so it is fun to be on the phone with them.

I have found that the current software we use called Office Hours, misses many features that I consider basic in doing the job of hunting down wayward patients, and getting them back on the treatment plan that we agreed to at the beginning.

One thing is simply that it would be nice to see their face. I remember people by their faces, much sooner than I do by their names. I also want to have lots of room to write details about them, staying of course within all of the privacy laws. Also, when I look at the schedule, color coded appointments speak to me much quicker than any other symbol. Red means they missed. Yellow or Green means the patient showed. I also want colors that mean we called and reminded them and spoke to them and they confirmed they would be in, versus we called and reminded them and spoke to them and they said they would probably be in today.

I want this position in our organization to be super efficient and easy to do.

So I am currently looking at two different options. Both options involve getting custom made software made. None of the E.M.R. (Electronic Medical Records) software could even come close on this.

Option 1 – Have it made using FileMaker Pro. Thank you to Sarah for turning me on to this amazing software. It is pretty much moron proof. You open it up, decide what info you need on a page, and within seconds you have created a database. It took me around 10 hours of study to get the basics of what it is. It is simply a fancier and more customizable version of Microsoft Excel. It can have a big box full of a bunch of smaller boxes of information. You can customize how it looks. You can write little mini programs to tell it what to do with all this information. To create what I want will make our office almost paper free. So even though I understand the software now, I would like to higher a professional FileMaker Pro person to make our contact management/ scheduling / EMR / Coding / Patient Treatment software.

Option 2 – When I get done with writing all of the exact requirements of the software, I will ask Ray, my super programmer who I have hired here and there to see what it would cost him to  make the software from PHP or some other programming language. Easier? Harder? I have no idea.

So for the past three weekends, I have been carefully writing a technical description of what I want the software to look like and do.

Then I will hit up Ray, a few cool FileMaker pro sites I saw, and my favorite programmer swap meet Rentacoder.

Also after many years I was finally able to purchase purposeinc.com I will be getting that up and running for my internet marketing consulting and pearl tile business. I will probably put links on it that point to this and all my other sites so there is one central place to get to all the other ones.

That’s it. If you are a reader of this site, and you read this, please leave me a comment. I find that like one out of every 5,000 readers leaves a comment, seriously, and I would love to hear who is stopping by!