Multiple people in charting

[gwyn]

We are having trouble since the update. If multiple people are in charting, the Dr. reviewing x-rays and the TC take treatment notes. Whoever goes in second is NOT locked out. It looks like they have entered and saved notes. As soon as the person who was in charting first makes any note, all subsequent users that were in while the first party was in lose their work. There is no warning that this will happen or has happened. There is no lock out feature to prevent this from happening. If the TC is in first, the doctor's notes are lost. If the Dr is in first, the TC notes from the exam are lost. THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM!!!! There is no way to recover anything. Dr and TC are VERY frustrated and concerned as there is no way to remember all the information.

[Anon]

Good day Gwyn,

I'm sorry for the issues that you are having, but because of the way Orthotrac accesses database records, it is not possible for us to add a lockout feature that will prevent a patient's chart from being accessed by one person while it is already being accessed by another person.  You will need to make sure that only one person is accessing a patient's chart at a time.

Please be aware that accessing the same function for one patient by more than one person at once can also cause other issues in the software, such as double posted payments, payments appearing on the ledger but not the daysheet, integrity errors, appointments showing on the schedule day but not on the patient's chart, and more.  The best practice is to ensure that your staff only accesses each patient on one workstation at a time, unless you are absolutely certain that each staff member is accessing completely different areas of the software  (for example, it is OK to access a patient's scheduling function while someone else is adding a payment for that patient).

If both the Dr. and treatment coordinator frequently take notes at the same time, I would recommend having them both keep a Notepad window open for the notes and then when the examination is completed, one of them can enter both sets of notes into Charting for that patient.

Again, I am sorry for the issues you are experiencing.

[gwyn]

This is not a satisfactory answer.

The point of multi user software is that many people are in the software at one time. We are all over a building. We do not know who is in the patient’s at every moment. The front desk may be working with a patient who is in and the accounting office may be working with all kinds of patients. It is nearly impossible to communicate who is in which patient at any given time on 20 different workstations.

Lots of software has lock out features. Excel will not let you open a file a particular moment if someone else is in that file. It does not seem unreasonable that this is a minimum safety feature.

This is very expensive software for this kind of error to be “unfixable.” My one year license is over $5000.00 per year.

We cannot be down to single user software for each patient. Please explain if I have misunderstood what you are saying.

Sincerely,

Gwyn Reeser

Office Manager

John A. Clinebell, D.D.S., M.S., P.C.

3732 Lavista Road

Decatur, GA 30033

404-325-8116

404-325-0417 FAX

[Anon]

Good day Gwyn,

I am not saying that you cannot ever have multiple staff members accessing the same patient at the same time.  It is understood and expected that multiple staff members will be needing to access the same patient to perform multiple different functions -- one person accessing the patient record to post a payment, another person accessing the schedule to make an appointment, a third one entering notes in Charting.

However, this open access to the patient is the same reason why we cannot "lock" the patient record when someone is accessing it.  If we added a lock to the system when someone was accessing a patient's functions (similarly to the way Microsoft does when someone is accessing an Excel file, as you noted), then no one else would be able to access the patient for anything at all, which would make the software just about unusable.

I understand it is difficult to coordinate work on a patient across the office.  Again, it is perfectly acceptable for multiple staff members to be accessing one patient for different functions.  But because of the way that Orthotrac writes records to the database (without an exclusive lock), care must be taken to ensure that multiple people are not accessing the same function at the same time  (whether this is Scheduling, Financials, or Charting / Treatment Card).  Although it would be difficult or impossible to coordinate work on different functions across the office for a single patient, it should not be difficult for two people accessing the same function, in the same area of the office, to coordinate with each other to ensure they don't duplicate each other's work.

I understand your desire to have only a specific function locked when one person is accessing that function.  Unfortunately, due to the way the software operates, that is not going to be feasible.  I am sorry if you feel this is unacceptable, but it is not a matter of not wanting to fulfill your wishes -- it's a matter of not being able to do so due to programming restrictions.