Ken Harrington is the Practice Manager at the Washington Endocrine Clinic in Washington DC, the private practice of Michael West, MD, PhD. Dr. West provides treatment and consulting for, among other things, diabetes management, thyroid care, adrenal insufficiency, pituitary tumors, and low testosterone.
"In the early stages of development we researched major EHR systems. After weeks of listening to all of the presentations and reading EHR web sites, we decided to buy an EHR, other than Practice Fusion, that could handle the workload of the front, middle, and back office. The system we choose to go with was moderately priced. We chose to buy this other system rather than lease the web based model. We hired an IT consultant to build a computer system using the latest technology of a dual server and thin clients.
However, the EHR system we purchased turned out to be a nightmare from the beginning.
It was simply too large and cumbersome for our practice. It was too complex to fully understand, and training was never completed due to overwhelming problems associated with the software. It offered little flexibility to meet the growing demands of our office, and the constant malfunctioning absorbed a large amount of our time that was needed in growing the young practice."
"We found Practice Fusion in a desperate attempt to research a new EHR system for the office. We decided to give it a try one evening and were pleasantly surprised to find that Practice Fusion was offering exactly what we were looking for in an EHR system. It could store patient's documents, schedule patient's appointments, and develop an office note with incredible ease and simplicity."
"Practice Fusion was incredibly easy to implement because of how simple it was to learn how to use. We continue to be amazed at how something so simple could solve so much of our office's needs.
We started by downloading as much of the patient data from our old EHR system into a file format that Practice Fusion could recognize. We had the Practice Fusion support team upload our data on a Friday; we spent a Monday morning training the staff on how to use and access it, and by noon on Monday the staff was scheduling new patients on the new calendar.
We then spent the next two weeks intensively going over each file, adding information that could not be extracted from the old EHR and adding all future patient appointments.
However, this did not stop us from using Practice Fusion right away. All new patients were added immediately. If an established patient called during this process we simply worked on updating their file immediately. Within a month's time we had filled in the previous appointments on the calendar to make the patient's record as complete as possible."
"We found the large visible time blocks to the calendar for patient appointments easy to add and modify, and to thus identify the agenda for the day. In our old EHR system we could not even block out time for when the doctor was away at a conference, or local doctors' meeting. In Practice Fusion, this function is simple to do."
"We found Practice Fusion's document manager was likewise simple to use. Once a document is signed, it is locked in a patient's file and easy to find. The document manager has been integrated into the patient's file where all documents can be easily located. In our old EHR system, the document manager was a separate database from the patient's files and each document uploaded had to be assigned permissions for who could open it."
"Practice Fusion has brought efficiency and increased productivity to our office. We have moved on from fighting with the EHR system to spending valuable time caring for patients, developing the services we can offer patients, and tending to the business of the office."
"Practice Fusion has given our office a peace of mind. We no longer dread working with the EHR system in the office. It has become an invaluable tool that we use to manage and operate the office. We would not think of replacing Practice Fusion at this point, simply because it does what we need an EHR system to do for our office. Practice Fusion has brought a renewed sense of confidence in knowing that an EHR system can be beneficial to a doctor's office. Practice Fusion has done everything we thought the expensive EHR system we purchased would do but did not. We have moved on in our thinking from 'When will the EHR system be fully operational?,' to 'How can we improve patient services and add new procedures?'"
"We have appreciated the updates that Practice Fusion continues to make. The staff is very open to hearing our thoughts on how to improve Practice Fusion. We have always found answers to our questions, and these were quick and helpful."