Ask ten practice managers what they’d buy and you’ll hear about eleven different systems. Somebody always changes their mind mid-sentence. A few people will tell you allscripts electronic medical records changed their whole workflow for the better, and a few will tell you they spent two years wanting to throw their monitor out a window. Both groups are telling the truth. We talk to clinics through DocResponse pretty much every week and the pattern repeats. What gets missed is the front end of the visit. Your patient registration system software sets the tone before anyone touches a chart, and when it’s clunky, the whole day runs behind. Then there’s the question of whether you want one big system or a core platform with extras bolted on, which is where the athenahealth marketplace comes up a lot. I’m not going to pretend there’s one right answer. I’ll just tell you how I’d think about it if it were my clinic and my money. What Allscripts Is Like When You’re Actually Using It Quick not...

Not the actual medical stuff, not even the billing, the scheduling. Someone calls and gets a front desk person who books you in a slot that doesn't exist. Someone cancels, someone's a "no-show," and another gives you a date that a practice has no openings in this month. The magic of epic healthcare software   for charting and records management is unquestioned, but it cannot quite breathe more time into a small clinic's schedule. Fortunately, there is scheduling software for medical practice needs. And if your new patients can't find you online to help you with that, a digital marketing agency may be your best choice. Doc Response has worked to confuse these three often, so let me try to make sense of them. Why Everything Fails Even When No One Is Slacking Off Scheduling feels simple to the outside world: all you do is write the name in a box. It's not that simple. You have providers working different days, have twenty-minute vs. ninety-minute visits, walk...

Ask ten clinic owners why the waiting room is jammed at 8:45 and nine of them will say they need another person up front. Maybe they do. I've heard it so many times I quit counting. But when you actually stand there and watch the morning happen, the trouble starts way earlier. Somebody's digging for an insurance card, somebody else is on their third clipboard, the phone won't stop. Add another body and you've just got more people standing in the same mess. If you've been poking around the athenahealth marketplace   hoping to find a fix, good, that's a decent instinct. Patient check in software is probably the first thing you'll run into there. Great. Just don't buy anything yet. Your patient intake process has to make sense first, and most clinics have never really looked at theirs. At DocResponse we've watched practices sign up for a tool on a Tuesday and drift back to paper before the month was out. Wrong fit, or no plan, usually both. So before an...