Practice Today

[lcarroll]

The Summer 2008 release of Practice Today (Pro) Version 08.09.01
is now available. This is considered a "major" update.

Here is a partial list of significant new features:

1. You can now keep track of an unlimited number of "inactive"
insurance profiles for a patient. You can recall any profile
to active status with one button click. This feature will enable
you to maintain a complete insurance history for each patient.

2. You can now designate a Primary Care Physician in the patient
record. This is in addition to Attending, Referring, Last Supervising,
Last Ordering, and Last Rendering Physicians.

3. We are pleased to have ChargeItPro Inc. onboard as a trading partner.
We have incorporated their "swipe" utility directly into Practice Today.
You can now swipe a patient's credit card from within the Practice Today
transaction window. The credit card approval process is automatically
performed, and the approval number is automatically entered
into the payment transaction. The simplicity is fantastic!

Here is their contact info:
Rose Calander
Payment Processing Partners
1588 Gilbreth Rd., Suite 205
Burlingame, CA 94010
Phone (800)989-2135
Website: http://www.chargeitpro.com/products/

4. The appointment scheduler has single click access to
+1Day, +1Week, +1Month, +6Months, and +1Year access.

5. The appointment scheduler will now display the patient's
medical checklist within the right click popup menu.

6. You can now formally enter complete profiles for an unlimited
number of "Support Providers/Caretakers/Contacts" for each patient record.
This feature is accessed from the "More Info" button in the
patient record.

7. There is now a "Document Folder Utility". This utility
will allow you to peruse and fix patient document folders from
a single screen. This utility will enable you to easily
identify patient records with invalid characters in the
First, Middle, and Last name fields that rendered an invalid
document folder filename.

8. All Medical Notes now have a unique identifying record number.
This will enable you to associate problems, medications, diagnoses,
and allergies with a specific medical note within a patient's
record.

9. Medical Notes can now keep track of every provider that
contributed to that specific note.

10. Medical Note Treatment Plans have been completely reworked.

11. Practice Today now include the 2008 CDC Recommended Childhood
and Adolescent Immunization Schedule. (This feature is significant!)

12. We are pleased to announce that Practice Today can prepare,
export, securely email, and accept patient Continuity of Care
Record (CCR). This feature is significant. It is important to note
that the ASTM E2369 Spec for the CCR does not include
provisions for including the contents of the Medical Note.
We believe that this is a terrible oversight. So, we have
made our CCR switch selectable for strict compliance, and enabled
you to include selected medical notes within the CCR if you
wish. If you have no idea what a CCR looks like, or what
it's good for, here is a link to a sample CCR.

http://www.legacypress.com/files/ptoday/ccr_sample.pdf


The most important aspect of the CCR is the associated style sheet.
The Practice Today CCR style sheet is exceptional when rendering
encounters and lab results when viewed within a browser.
(This is a significant feature.)

13. You now have significantly more functionality when preparing
practice medical reports for diagnoses, medications, problems, lab
orders and results. For example, you can easily tell Practice
Today to prepare a report that lists: all patients for a given
race, and sex, who have a medical diagnosis within a given ICD9 range,
and who also satisfy a given age range and diagnosis date range.
This is a useful tool for practices that have an interest in
clinical informatics.

14. Practice Today now includes a utility that will enable you
to relocate all patient documents (i.e. scanned documents,
claim images, statement images, medical note reports, etc.)
to a new drive and/or folder. This utility is useful if
you have outgrown your current hard drive and you must move
Practice Today to a new drive with a different drive letter
and/or folder.

15. The Re-flag Transaction Utility is significantly more powerful.
You can now easily instruct Practice Today to "Re-flag all Unpaid
Insurance Transactions within a date range (or for a specific
insurer), that have Zero insurance paid"; or "Change all PAID
'I' charge transactions to 'P' transactions within a date range".

16. You can now save and recall the "Settings" for Selective
Patient Listings.

Please note that this is just a PARTIAL list of significant new features
included in this release. I have not listed the many small bug fixes
that some of you have pointed out along the way.

(BTW, if you would like to make sure that a specific bug-fix
is included in this release, please email the details to
support@legacypress.com ASAP.)

I would like to address one more item of great import before closing.

It is my understanding that physicians (and some payers) want EHRs
that are CCHIT certified. We have visited the issue of CCHIT certification,
and have decided against it, opting instead to demonstrate full
"compliance" on our www.cchitcompliant.com website.

Our thought is to demonstrate that we are 100% compliant
each year, back it up with a meaningful challenge,
and allow our clients to keep their money in their pocket,
as the certification process now costs over $10,000 per year FOREVER.

This release of Practice Today is compliant with the CCHIT Test Scripts
for the 2008 Certification of Ambulatory EHRs v5.02 Final Version
released on June 13, 2008 with the following important exception:

The CCHIT interoperability standard embraces the
following xml rulesets:

CDA R2
CCD
HITSP C32

Practice Today has embraced the Continuity of Care Record (CCR)
as the standard for interoperability. The CCR spec is technically
superior. We are not alone in this struggle, and we believe
(and have been assured by others) that the CCHIT spec will
eventually include the CCR.

If you don't quite understand what I'm talking about, don't worry.
If you are not using the Practice Today EMR, don't worry.

Here is a link to the CCHIT Test Script of 2008 Certification of
Ambulatory EHRs web page:

http://www.cchit.org/certify/ambulatory/index.asp

Click on the second link: Final Ambulatory EHR Test Script

Download and open the document.

Starting on page 6, read through some of the procedures.

The document contains 229 procedures/tasks that an EHR must
demonstrate for certification. Practice Today can perform 217
of these 229 tasks. I will demonstrate each of these task on
the www.cchitcompliant.com website within the coming days.

Please note that twelve task items relate specifically to Interoperability
and the CCHIT poorly chosen standard. If/When CCHIT includes the CCR as
a method of interoperability, then Practice Today will
comply with all 229 of the 229 tasks.

In short, if you are not using the Practice Today EHR, this
discussion is moot. If you are, then rest assured that
we are diligently addressing the current trends and expectations
for a state of the art electronic health record.

I encourage you to update your Practice Today and embrace the new features.

Regards,
~LCarroll, CxO
_________________
~lcarroll