Electronic Medical Records test drive

[emr]

Templates, scheduling, soap notes, prescription writing and electronic billing

[Scroggie]

What systems have you folks here test driven/used?

I have looked at Springcharts. Seemed okay, kinda limited for my taste. New version coming out soon.

[BigDoc]

Tried SOAPWARE, good for solo ha got a bit of a learning curve, like most, did not use it in practice, just demoed. The designer is a physician, I think it is compiled to run on access, I don't know whether he changed the database in more recent versions.
AmazingChart demo was less yielding.

[Scroggie]

Oh yeah, I tried amazing charts too.

Too rigid, I need flexibilty in designing the layout of notes, letters. Neither of these allowed that.

Supposedly SOAPware is looking better with use of MSDE (not Jet).

I've heard good things about e-Clinical works too.

and of course there's the cult of Praxis.

[witchdoc]

What would you guys consider Gold Standard, ignorin price

[Scroggie]

Its hard to say. The really cool, multifunctional, glitzy web page EMR's won't let you demo them (except in a controlled environment).

Springcharts gets good marks, but its not my style (I sometimes edit code with the patient in the room, gotta stop that).

[Quack]

Eloquently Stated (http://www.eloquentlystated.com/) is sold on Ebay, has a demo, which froze my Windoze XP, had to go into the registry to remove it, anyone else tried it?

[kdavis]

I have been using MediNotes now for about 9 months and am thinking about canning it. I am a general surgeon and am using it only for notes, H&P's, and referral letters. I'm not using it to its full potential, I'm sure, but it seems to be fairly cumbersome at best. The templates are okay, but fairly complicated to streamline/modify. The referral letter options is pretty nice, though. Whips out a standard form letter which plugs in your entire H&P or just the A/P. You can write Rx's on it, too, but I don't. I use the program on a Toshiba tablet PC, but am not using as it is intended (I don't take it in the room and tap on it while talking to the patient - I'll never do that as I consider it very impersonal). I just sit in my office after seeing patients and write the notes - I would much rather have a desktop PC or a more powerful laptop to do that.

The system was in place for a few months here before I came into the practice and basically inherited the software and hardware without being able to shop around for it myself. The rest of the office seems to be ready to can it now, too (poor support, cumbersome to use, etc.). I'm used to EMR, having come from a VA system that had become totally computerized (one of the testbeds for the national system as it evolved, so we endured all the growing pains). It's definitely the wave of the future, and it certainly has its advantages, but dictating is SOOO much faster...

[alborg]

Witchdoc-

I would never ignore the price- an expensive EMR will never become a "gold standard" if it's overpriced. Just like the value of a stock in the stock market is obtained from its "price to earnings" ratio, so goes with EMRs. I will not even look at an EMR without knowing the price up front first!

Of course, when I look at an EMR it's to look for more ideas for my own home-grown system than to use it in my office.

Regards,
Al

[Kursk]

Just got done playing with the online demo of openEMR. While it is ambitious and I admit I gave a light going over it doesn't seem too user friendly. No text entry tools that I could see, pretty much just a series of open text boxes. RX writer seemed very crude, I would hate to use it every day, very slow, no defaults, no easy picks etc. Am I being unfair? Should I go back and dig deeper?