I defaulted to Simple Practice. Likely to continue. Most things are equivocal, some are better.
The negatives are as follows:
-My assistant can't see the medication app Dr. First, so inquires by patients, of where's my meds, get punted to me. When before could be viewed and informed a refill was sent on X date.
-Printing a lab order sheet to give patients is brutal. I just stopped. I now have a paper template where I hand write in patient name, address, DOB, Dx, etc. So much easier with Luminello.
-Doing records requests to forward on a whole chart is brutal with SP. I miss the simple check a box and just download to PDF that luminello had.
-Billing entry for various insurance EOBs that need to be manually entered is really weird with the terminology and "unallocated funds" my assistant and I keep forgetting to write down how to navigate it and then struggle through making it work. Not the most intuitive for billing entries with odd nomenclature.
-Patients can't do partial payments its an all or none, and we get criticism a lot for that.
-Patients can't log in with a password like most things. You have to click from a link within in email. Anyone who struggles with computers, struggles to get in. I've had one patient already drop me because of the tech difficulties.
-It frequently brings up the emergency contacts as options to send reminders to as though they are integral part of the patient care - not my population. It sets itself up to one day be a whoops, HIPAA issue with an accidental click.
-The seperate categors of Mental Status, Notes, Diagnosis/Plan, etc is just dumb. I miss luminello having only one charting section. And the seperate "provider notes section" which was used like an "after visit summary" in Epic land. Now I'm not really doing updates, but just once at time of initial consult on Diagnsosis/Plan and sending that to patients once.
-You have duplicates... This constant reminder of you have duplicates, so if a patient lists spouse as emergency contact, and then you see spouse, it won't stop pointing out chart duplicates.
-Clicking into the Rx app, same app thankfully, but the means to get into it is more cumbersome than with luminello
-Insurance claim forms pull from the Diagnosis/Plan document... if that isn't updated than you only get those diagnosis codes. I have to do a lot more customization of codes on the claims than I did with luminello - as it had the diagnosis codes in that encounter for that note.
-Insurance claims I have type I and type II NPI, and the way Simple Practice integrates those on the claims, I had a lot of rejections until I figured out how to make it work, which means I have to do a lot of custom entry on the forms to get things right. Luminello was better.
-BIG ISSUE: luminello had an amazing task list that my assistant and I could both see, adjust and edit. Not so with Simple Practice. So we had to create a secondary work around on an Excell document in our shared drive with Google Drive, and we use that as our task list replacement. We very much miss that feature with luminello.
-Snippets are so much slower, having to scroll all the way up, click on their snippet equivalent and find it. No fast 'smart phrase' and this slows me down.
Positives:
-something about the interface my assistant believes patients are simply more likely to pay and not need nudging like with luminello. We've used less stamps.
-I'm exploring the gradations of patient cancelations on the chart and not just deleting out appointments or reschedules but leaving them. So as to see how things unfold on the analytics section.
-Patients can pick their reminder, text, call, or email. No more complaints "I want this, not this reminder type."
-Similar cut/past note feature to carry forward and great for follow up visits.
-Can put down where a referral came from and keep look up a report to see who your main referral sources are. Interesting.
