Comments on: HIStalk Practice Interviews Christoph Diasio MD, Sandhills Pediatrics, Southern Pines, NC

By: Bignurse

Bignurse — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:09:35 +0000

Amen, brother! And, I love your bird dog metaphors.

SRSSoft is the new paradigm for EMR. The usability, customizability, and workflow of SRS far surpasses most of the CCHIT-certified products out there. It does take guts to move in this direction, but there’s no guarantee that big-ticket vendors can deliver anything better in the future, either.

By: Christoph Diasio

Christoph Diasio — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 20:31:53 +0000

Hi Nancy-
The server operating sytem is some flavor of Windows Server OS- We have a server that runs the SRSsoft software and handles the faxserver and will soon handle E-Rx. Despite the fact I prefer the faxed Rxs for the reasons above, one of our major insurers is insisting that we E-Rx for an incentive program. Since the interface I will see in SRS is essentially the same fax vs E-Rx, I’m not complaining too loudly, but I still think E-Rx is more about the adult on BP meds forever, not kids on occasional doses of liquid meds……
The computers we carry into the room, or use at the nurses station run Windows and MS office and our PM system emulator, ANITA. We started with tablets but are moving to laptops for longer battery life and cheaper unit cost.
We store our paper in folders for what we scanned each today (eg a folder of scanned paper 4-09-10) just as a warm security blanket in case of a scanning error, etc. We have hardly ever needed it, but everyone likes knowing it is there! We use the pure SRS interface for all our actual work.
Some of this is hard to visualize unless you see it- I promise I don’t get a commission from SRSsoft, it just has been an excellent solution for our practice!
COCIT is a little more interested in full-bore doctor data entry EMR, but most of the COCIT group inside the AAP belongs to SOAPM, the section on practice management and I already wrote an article about our EMR as well as a back-and-forth with a CMIO who got into an argument with me about doctor-data entry vs useful EMR… Join SOAPM and you will be able to see the archives!

By: Nancy

Nancy — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:34:10 +0000

Hi Dr. Diasio,
I’m one of those geek pediatricians and I am very disappointed with the proprietary point and click EMRs I’ve seen. I know EMRs can be better than that and they don’t have to be terribly expensive.

I read a link about how your practice uses the hybrid EMR system in AAP brief, but the article was lacking in many details. Could you explain further how your office uses this EMR? For instance, where do you store your paper files, if you do store them? What os do you use, what kind of hardware setup do you have. Maybe an article in the AAPs Health Technology Council newsletter would be helpful, I’d love to hear more. Thanks.

By: Christoph Diasio

Christoph Diasio — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:03:47 +0000

My intent with this interview was to demonstrate that there are others ways to “go electronic” without point-and-click box ad nauseaum, and that you can solve many of the real problems we face in a pure paper chart world.
That said, I’ll try to address the questions specific to SRS.
We can “thumb-flip electronically by looking a PDFs of scanned notes. It is a little slower than a “real” paper chart, sure, but you have the benefits of backed up charts, no lost charts, etc that make up for it!
We do create a new, hand written note each visit but I’m fine with that since our notes are heavily templated based on what work well for our docs. SRS does have neato provisions for dictated notes, but we see kids back so quickly in pediatrics that dictation never worked well for us in the past.
We mostly fax our prescriptions through the SRS RX module because many of our parents prefer locally owned ‘mom-and-pop’ pharmacies that don’t do the e-prescribed Allscripts monopoly. I also prefer the fax because when the corporate pharmacies claim they didn’t get it, I can look in the Faxserver log and tell them they did get it at 10:50:01…. SRS will do E-rx if we wish, however.
Labs are scanned in- we could pay to have a neat electronic connection to our hospital lab, but we do so few labs that we honestly haven’t bothered!
I agree wholeheartedly that we need to listen to a broader swath of docs than the “geek docs!

By: disbelieving doc

disbelieving doc — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:26:03 +0000

your right Gregg, great interview!

thanks for Dr Diasio for ‘telling it like it is’!! … and thanks for Histalk for seeking out these in the trench views such as this and writings such as Dr Alexander. Most of the HIT literature is enough to make you vomit, by interviewing the ‘geek-docs’ who love to play around with gizmos. These people make up less than 5%-10% of docs and are very different than the other 95% of us…… just give us some stuff that HELPS us rather than gets in the way… or get it outta here!