Robin Szabo, OD, opened her Crosby, Texas, practice 20 years ago using electronic health records (EHR). For the past few years, however, she’d been considering a transition to a different system. She had been eyeing Uprise Practice Management and EHR, but hadn’t made the conversion yet because shifting from one system to another takes concentrated effort.
When stay-home orders came into effect in 2020, Dr. Szabo saw this as a great opportunity to get herself and the staff used to the new system. Learn how practice closures helped Dr. Szabo make the switch to a new EHR system in this case study. Here's an excerpt:
Dr. Szabo Switched EHRs During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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The more relaxed pace of learning the software and the reduced patient flow mandated by local ordinances helped when the practice reopened to routine care in early May. Dr. Sazbo states, “with the lower-than-usual patient volume, we have some downtime to work on the conversion more,” she says. The practice purposefully added lots of breaks into the daily schedule, knowing that team members would need time to adjust to new safety measures and social distancing.
Reliable System is Critical
Dr. Szabo says the COVID-19 closing demonstrated just how essential a reliable software system is. “Patients have the ability to fill out their paperwork in the patient portal. That means my staff isn’t filling it in, which minimizes the time the patient is in the office and increases our efficiency,” she says.
Uprise would help because it’s so easy to access documents and have patients upload information. With her previous system, patient documents or images emailed were loaded to one server and from there, she’d have to email them to another system, download the images, open the patient’s chart and add them.
Information at the Ready
Dr. Szabo sees that its powerful features will help improve office efficiencies immediately. “It helps us with the billing and coding, alerting us before we send it off if something in our coding doesn’t meet the rules for that code. Those rules change so frequently, it’s very difficult to keep up with that manually,” she says.
She went through a staff restructuring when she began using VisionWeb for billing. Now, it’s easier to transmit the information online through Uprise to VisionWeb. Dr. Szabo states, "I had been wanting to make the move to Uprise for a while, but I was putting off the growing pains to make the move. This downtime presented me with the opportunity to make this switch.”
Read Dr. Szabo's full story here:
