Somebody at your clinic is texting patients from their own phone. I’d bet money on it. Maybe it’s the front desk, maybe a nurse who got tired of playing phone tag, maybe the doctor. It works, so nobody stops it. Meanwhile the practice has spent a small fortune on epic electronic medical records , which is a serious system with serious security, and then the actual conversations with patients happen on a personal iPhone with a cracked screen. That’s the gap. HIPAA compliant text messaging is how you close it, and plenty of clinics don’t think about it until something breaks. At Doc Response we run into this constantly. A locked-down chart on one side, a free-for-all on the other. So here’s how the two pieces fit, where people mess up, and what to do about it. What the Chart System Is Really Doing All Day Epic is huge, everybody knows the name. Hospitals use it, big groups use it, and a lot of smaller offices touch it through partners or referrals. But what’s it doing, really? It holds t...

I’ve seen it a bunch of times. You walk into a clinic at 8:55 and there’s one person at the desk, phone stuck to their ear, someone waiting with a clipboard, another patient asking where the bathroom is. Nobody there is bad at their job. The setup just doesn’t work anymore. Patient communication software was built for this exact situation, yet plenty of practices still see it as a luxury, something for the big hospital systems with IT departments.  It isn’t. At DocResponse the complaints we hear from small practice owners are always the same ones. People don’t show up, forms go missing, the phone never stops, and patient check in takes so long that the doctor starts the day late. Throw in clinic scheduling software that’s either ancient or doesn’t exist (paper books still happen, believe it or not) and the whole place runs on stress and coffee. So What Does This Software Actually Do All Day Forget the dashboards for a second. What it really does is talk to your patients so your st...

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...