Jane
Barnwell, MD
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share it with you.
Free
and low cost services useful for medical offices:
Please let as know if you use any of these. Stop back from time to
time because we will be adding more. And please lets us know if you
have any tips.
Docmein
is a free
online service for private healthcare providers to manage patient
appointments online. You can allow patients to schedule their own
appointments and you can see your schedule from anywhere (including a
smart cell phone). It integrates easily (one click) with Microsoft
Outlook schedule. Docmein will send the patient an email reminder of
his appointment for free, a telephone call reminder for just 10 cents
each call or a text message reminder for 8 cents each. Each practice
has its own dedicated information page that can be linked from your
website - here is ours.
JumbleMe.com
Send and receive secure HIPAA Compliant emails. Features and sign
up page. Free for 100 emails /year, $10 /year for 500 emails per year and $49.95 /year for 5000 emails /year.
Dropbox
Securely transfer files
between computers over the internet. For example, you can drag a file
to a Dropbox folder for us and it will instantly show up on our
computers and vice versa (let us know if you want to do that).
Program
comparison and pricing.
Free to $19.95 /month depending upon storage size (free is fine for
transferring files if you delete them after the transfer).
Nettalk Need
another phone line? Instead of $40 /month, how
about $49.95 the first year and $39.95 /year
thereafter including free US and Canadalong distance, voicemail and
other features? If you have a phone system, the Nettalk device can plug
right into it. If you have a smart phone system, it can be programmed
to automatically use this line for long distance calls. You can have
your existing phone numbers transferred to Nettalk but knowing how
often Qwest (now Centurylink) screws things up, this would scare me for
a main line. Nettalk can also be set up on a smart phone so you can
talk without using cell phone minutes.
Skype
is a bit more
expensive than Nettalk (about $64 /year for a dedicated phone number
and unlimited US and Canada long distance calls) but it has a major
advantage: you can answer and talk using any computer so your office is
anywhere you have a computer.
We have found Skype's quality to be inconsistent so we cannot recommend
it for office use.
Metrofax
$7.95 /month (instead
of $30 /month for a dedicated fax line). Faxes are emailed to you in
PDF format (encrypted if you turn that on) so they are easy to insert
into an EHR system. This also gets rid of another machine on your desk.
You can even send and receive faxes from your smart cell phone using
the camera to photograph then send documents.
Securimage
is an open-source
free PHP CAPTCHA script for generating complex images and CAPTCHA codes
to protect forms from spam and abuse. It can be easily added into
existing forms on your website to provide protection from spam bots.
Securimage does everything from generating the CAPTCHA images to
validating the typed code. Audible codes can be streamed to the browser
with Flash for the vision impaired. We used it on our referral page,
PDFill Editor
allows you to fill
in or annotate any pdf file whether it is a fillable form or not and
save it(you cannot save a fillable form in Adobe Reader). You can also
convert any pdf file to a fillable form. Also downloaded with PDFill
Editor is a free PDF & Image Writer that allows you to create
PDF
or Image from ANY printable windows application and a Free PDF Tools
utility that allows you to modify pdf files in many ways. You can keep
the Writer and Tools even if you don't buy PDFill Editor. We created
our intake forms in Microsoft Word, printed them using the PDF Writer,
then added fields using PDFill Editor For example see the demographics form (cancel the
printer dialog when it opens.) The $20 PDFill Editor does a lot the
$500 Adobe Acrobat does.
pdffiller.com
lets you fill PDF Forms on-line. It is not as powerful as PDFill Editor
but you don't have to download and install any software and it is free.
GoDaddy.com
We use godaddy.com for our web server, domain registration and
SSL certificate. Their service is competitively priced, easy to use and
their support is excellent.
If you have not yet committed to an EHR system, here are two free
EHR, PM (Practice Management) solutions. Both are ONC-ATB Ambulatory
EHR 2011-2012 certified so you can get the stimulus rebate for
meaningful use. Each has over a hundred thousand users and adds
thousands of users each month.
OpenEMR is a
Free and Open
Source, Practice management and Electronic Medical Records software
application. It features fully integrated electronic medical records,
practice management, scheduling, electronic billing,
internationalization, patient portal and free support. It can run on
Microsoft systems, Unix-like systems (Linux, UNIX, and BSD systems),
Mac OS X and other platforms. It is totally free to install on your own
computers or web service. You can find hosting solutions (so it will be
completely internet based) starting at $25 /month.
Practice
Fusion
is an ad-supported EHR-PM solution. The single ad displays at the
bottom of the page and is easy to ignore. It includes charting,
e-prescribing, billing, scheduling, patient portal and patient
management. It is fully cloud based so you don't need sophisticated
computers or servers and you can access it from almost anywhere like
the hospital.
After 6 months of studying EHR systems and trying different EHR systems, we
have come to look at the EHR industry on the same level as used care dealers.
I have decided to write my own EHR system. After just two weeks of coding,
I have come up with something better than anything else I have seen. l have
now been improving it for the last two months (it is now July 21). I plan to
get it approved by ONC for meaningful use and put it on the market later this year.
If you don't yet have an EHR or are unhappy with the one you are using (believe me,
when you see this one, you will be unhappy with the one you are now using) you might
want to take a look at what I have so far.