Check out this short video, featuring PCC client Joseph F. Hagan, MD from Lakeside Pediatrics, who shares his insights on the value of having the right EHR and billing solution for his busy pediatric practice.
Over the years, as I’ve watched our software, our pediatric partner software and our pediatric EHR evolve, it’s evolved based on what practitioners in primary care need. We’re fortunate enough that PCC is doing its work for practices like ours. Practices that are small, practices that are medium-sized, practices that are typically physician-owned (not always), but practices that do primary care.
When you first use the PCC EHR, you develop a process of creating notes that you will then populate and use in your own practice. And a very great strength of PCC is that it’s not hard to develop those notes, and you can have whatever notes you want. For example, everybody has a sick call note. One of my partners and I can’t agree over whether or not it should be prepopulated with the answers. So, we have two! You know, one is mine, one is theirs, okay? Another example is I do a lot of developmental behavioral pediatrics, a lot of mental health, so, I have a very specific template that has to do with ADHD rechecks. They’ve dotted all the ‘I’s, and crossed all the ‘T’s, to allow us to certify with NCQA that it was sufficiently medical homie, and I have a specific one for ADHD MedStars. I have one for anxiety and depression, so you have that kind of flexibility.
Along came Bright Stars and we wanted to put in all of the universal and selective screening that the individual visits called for; easy! I wanted to be able to handout the pre-visit screening tools, including the developmental screens, on a clipboard (in paper-form), to families, with a pencil, when they walk through the door. And I called PCC up and I said, ‘is it possible to, you know, match several of these individual ones to individual visits and print them out before they show up?” And they said, “Well, yeah!” So, that’s how we do it. You know, nobody yet has done it, except for CHADIS, in a way that is done electronically, but, you know, a lot of people are having to do the paper, and why would I have my staff leaf through which piece of paper they need where, when my system, our system, can print it out for us? We wanted to embed the anticipatory guidance in the visit, and we did that, and we did this is the context of Bright Futures IV, fourth edition, along with PCC’s help, so we’d get it right, because the fourth edition released on February 17th of this year.
You had staff in our office, if you recall, who were there to help us, and they were here to make sure that we, you know, knew exactly which key to push when, and they actually showed us how to make the process go faster. I’ve had colleagues at large institutions who were told something absurd like, you know, ‘plan on seeing one-fourth the number of patients per day for the first week, two weeks, month,’ ridiculous sorts of things. Yet, and, we were a small practice; you know, if we didn’t see those kids and families, they didn’t get seen. So, how were we going to schedule less that day? I mean, sure, we could cut back on our physicals a little bit, so we wouldn’t be inundated, but the kids who were sick needed to be seen. And you know what? We still got home at a reasonable hour those early days.
So, it’s, you know, yes, to install is work, to install is a process and a learning curve. Our experience has been, though, that PCC has been there helping us, our experience has been that the learning curve was quick and easy. We have found the way they price to be quite fair and maybe novel. You know, we’re really; we’re paying for the service that we get, and that one monthly fee we pay; we get a lot of service, so I have difficulty coming up with something negative to say to you.
Jill Rinehart, MD, FAAP
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