One of the great joys of being a DPC doc is being able to spend as much time with your patients as you need. And sometimes, these encounters can go on for quite some time. To help you document these longer appointments, we’ve introduced artificial intelligence to improve our existing Audio Transcripts feature.
The upgraded version of Audio Transcripts uses AI to support contexts 10 times larger than the current limits, meaning even the most extensive patient sessions can be transcribed and converted into SOAP notes, summaries, or diagnosis suggestions in seconds. What once took hours can now be demolished in a few clicks.
From routine check-ups to hours-long patient encounters, you can now efficiently document and communicate patient information of all lengths and complexities.
The best part? You don’t have to do anything. Simply upload the audio file using your phone’s Voice Memo app (or WhatsApp, iMessage, or whatever recording app you prefer) and Atlas.md’s AI will transcribe it automatically, crushing even more administrative busywork so you can focus on your patients.
For a more in-depth look at how this works, check out our support article. And if you have any questions about AI Audio Transcripts please don’t hesitate to reach out at support@atlas.md.
Whether generating referrals or contacting patients, a certain amount of correspondence is part and parcel of your day-to-day as a doctor. While there are many ways you can already do this in Atlas.md, today we’re rolling out improvements that make it easier to send email attachments to third parties directly from the EMR, where all your patient information lives.
These improvements allow you to send attachments not only to patients, but to anyone, including other doctors, specialists, imaging labs, and more. This makes it even simpler to share important documents and files and keep a record of it.
When sending attachments from a patient’s chart, you’ll now have the option to change the recipient from the default patient. You can do this manually if the recipient’s email address isn’t in the system. But if their information is in your contact list, Atlas.md’s autocompleter will find it for you.
This makes moving attachments and sending documents much faster, streamlining communication and saving you tons of time in the process.
Have you ever been sent important information via email, sworn that you didn’t receive it, only to find that exact email lurking in the depths of your inbox, unread?
This happens to everyone – including your patients.
To account for this all-too-human problem, we’ve made some improvements to our self-scheduling feature.
Currently, you can easily send your patients a link to self-schedule from Atlas.md using email, but now you can also do it via SMS.
This means if your patient is someone who doesn’t check their email regularly, you can send invitations to self-schedule appointments directly to their phone. This not only gives you greater patient reach and engagement, but it saves you even more time by reducing the admin required to schedule consultations.
This may come as a surprise to no one (except, perhaps, existing healthcare providers), but patients who trust their providers tend to stay onboard for longer.
One report by Accenture found that patients who trust their healthcare providers are six times more likely to remain with them. It also found that 89 percent of patients who did leave a provider did so because the physician wasn’t easy to deal with, the administration was stifling and difficult to navigate, or digitalization was underdeveloped.
While big businesses with deep pockets often miss the mark, DPC clinics are making a notable difference by doing something old-school yet radical—building trust through straightforward and fair practices.
Trust and Transparent Pricing
It’s well known that the traditional healthcare industry can feel like a maze of hidden fees, leaving patients not just sick but financially bruised.
And like any market where there’s a clear need and opportunity, DPC models have risen and completely upended this trend by cutting through the complexity with clear, transparent pricing.
Rather than being terrified of opening a letter from their healthcare provider with an endless list of charges, DPC patients know exactly what they’re paying each month without the dread of unexpected charges.
This peace of mind embodies the principle that healthcare shouldn’t be a financial gamble.
You can see this clearly with medication and copays.
Where big healthcare corporations mark up medications and lab tests, turning necessities into profit centers, DPC clinics offer these services at wholesale prices, with a minimal markup of around 10%.
And while copays often act as barriers, deterring patients from seeking care when they need it, DPC models smash these barriers by ditching copays altogether. Many DPC practices go even further, offering additional procedures as part of their membership at no extra cost.
This approach does way more than simply lower costs—it builds immense trust. Patients understand where their money goes, and they appreciate the honesty that is part-and-parcel of a DPC clinic’s business model.
The DPC Edge: Flexibility, Speed, and Efficiency
While big healthcare outfits are floundering with their cookie-cutter approaches and bloated bureaucracies, DPC clinics are thriving by staying lean and agile.
They’re able to adapt quickly, embrace new technologies and tailor their services to the immediate needs of their community.
Perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic, where DPC clinics were able to provide uninhibited effective care thanks to their rapid adoption of telemedicine technologies prior to and during the pandemic. This meant they could continue to offer virtual consultations and remote monitoring despite lockdowns and social distancing.
Even today, DPC clinics have already started to leverage nascent AI and machine learning technologies to analyze patient data. These AI-driven tools are being used to streamline practices and identify patients at risk of chronic conditions, enabling early intervention and personalized treatment plans.
Many DPC clinics have also developed mobile apps that allow patients to schedule appointments, access their medical records, and communicate directly with their healthcare providers, while traditional hospitals have patients waiting in endless call lists hoping to get an appointment.
These practices aren’t just providing care; they’re cultivating communities anchored in trust.
In DPC settings, this trust translates into tangible loyalty, with patients not just returning but actively promoting their clinics. They become advocates, drawn in by the fair, transparent practices that set DPC apart from the bureaucratic giants of healthcare.
Trust as a Strategy, Not Just a Value
In a landscape dominated by corporate healthcare, DPC clinics prove that being small and focused on trust can be a powerful strategy.
They offer a blueprint for healthcare that prioritizes patient care over profits, simplicity over complexity, and transparency over obscurity.
By aligning their business practices with patient interests, DPC models aren’t just surviving; they’re thriving, showing that in healthcare, trust is not just a value—it’s a strategy for success.
In February we rolled out two time-saving, chart-wide AI features: AI Referrals and Chart Summaries. Today we’re launching enhanced versions of both features that will deliver even more valuable results.
Our AI Chart Summaries feature is now more efficient and detailed. We’ve improved it to give you a quick overview paragraph at the top of each summary, highlighting the most important information. Below this, you’ll find more detailed sections about your patient’s history.
This update is great for pre-appointment recaps, showing you the key points before providing more in-depth details. The feature also now reads twice as much information from the patient’s chart, going further back in time for a better, more detailed summary.
We also made improvements to AI Referrals. Now, it can read twice as much information from a patient’s chart to provide a more detailed referral. It can also analyze information that might be buried deep in a patient’s chart so that nothing important gets overlooked.
On top of this, it also takes into account the specific specialty you’ve selected to ensure that the referral is highly relevant to the specialist’s field.
For a more detailed look at how these improved features work, check out our support articles on AI Referrals and AI Chart Summaries.
And as always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@atlas.md.
Have you ever wanted to text a patient on the go? Or check your day’s schedule with your morning coffee? Or just take a look at your to-do list without having to open your browser? Well, now you can in a dedicated mobile app.
Atlas.md Mobile is your Atlas.md companion. It’s an app for your mobile device that contains the Atlas.md features you use most – messaging patients, appointment tracking, and task management.
With Atlas.md Mobile, you can now conveniently help patients and take care of business even when you’re not in front of your computer.
The app is currently only available to iPhone users, but we’ll be releasing an Android version soon.
Big healthcare is big business. And with a market cap topping $4.5 trillion, everyone wants a share of the profits. This is why the recent forays of retail giants like Amazon, CVS, and Walgreens in the healthcare sector aren’t surprising in the least.
While this might seem like a logical transition as big corporations find ways to expand, what’s not logical (at least at first glance) is that they… kind of suck at the whole healthcare thing.
To date, these retail giants have spent billions buying up primary care chains hoping to tap into the massive healthcare pie. But despite their colossal investments, each company has ended up with the same results — disappointment, unstaunched money hemorrhaging, and tsunamis of retrenchments.
With seemingly endless resources to tap into, why can’t these giants cut it when it comes to healthcare, especially when DPC clinics nationwide are continually lowering costs, increasing quality of care, and providing more access to patients everywhere?
Let’s find out.
The Big Business Approach
The clue to pinning down exactly why big businesses can’t hack healthcare lies in their approach.
Instead of starting from the ground up, connecting with communities, and building trust along the way, the corporate method is to acquire as many primary-care chains as possible and gain direct access to millions of patients.
These have been anything but smooth, and the plug-and-play approach proved that trying to enter the healthcare market without patient consideration is complex and costly.
The results speak for themselves:
In an attempt to reduce costs by around $100 million, Amazon laid off “a few hundred” One Medical staff, shutting corporate offices, and dramatically reducing marketing budgets.
So if the big business approach of “buy now and integrate later” doesn’t work, what makes DPC so successful, especially with fewer resources, staff, and patients?
There are a few different things to consider:
Lower overheads. Without the need to process insurance claims, DPC clinics can operate with lower overhead costs. This allows them to invest more in patient care and pass savings on to their patients.
Focus on prevention. Because DPC physicians focus on preventive care, they reduce the need for specialist and hospital care, which leads to healthier patients and lower overall healthcare costs.
Simplicity. DPC eliminates the complexity of insurance billing by charging patients a flat monthly fee. This can significantly reduce overhead costs and the hassle for both providers and patients. It also makes healthcare costs predictable, which patients really value.
Flexibility. DPC clinics are smaller and more nimble than large corporations. This means they can quickly adopt new technologies and practices that improve care and efficiency way faster. This flexibility is a significant advantage over lumbering big business healthcare models.
Patient first. The DPC model emphasizes the patient-doctor relationship, one built on care, community, and trust, rather than just the bottom line.
Simply put, DPC offers a simpler, more patient-centric approach, designed to reduce costs at every step of the healthcare journey.
Big Healthcare Is Struggling. DPC Has Never Been Healthier.
The above stories highlight how the attempt to graft complex healthcare services onto existing commercial infrastructures misses a crucial piece of the puzzle — patient care.
While scale and profitability are necessary from a business perspective, they clash with the personalized nature of effective healthcare delivery.
On the other hand, Direct Primary Care exemplifies how healthcare can thrive when it is built from the ground up, focusing primarily on patient care rather than profit margins.
By eliminating the middlemen and nurturing a relationship between patients and physicians, DPC shows what’s possible when healthcare sticks to its roots — providing quality, accessible, and affordable care with an uncomplicated, patient-focused approach.
Streamlined Enrollment Billing improves the enrollment process by letting you bill all new enrollees simultaneously when accepting them as patients.
It gives you the option to charge subscriptions (either the full amount or a prorated amount for part of the month) and collect payments immediately – this also includes any outstanding enrollment fees.
While you can currently do this manually, it requires going through many different pages and dozens of clicks for each new patient. The improved enrollment process lets you bill all newly enrolled patients simultaneously with just a couple of clicks.
This feature also gives you the ability to prorate subscription billing amounts for new clinics migrating to Atlas.md. This gives you much more flexibility if you want to batch-prorate subscriptions, especially if you’re switching to Atlas.md mid-month, for example.
For more details, check out our help article. And if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@atlas.md.
Patient correspondence, sick leave letters, appointment cancellations – being a doctor involves creating a lot of formal documentation.
Letterheads takes the pain out of this process by letting you generate documents with just a few clicks.
Simply choose the title and content for the body of the Letterhead and Atlas.md will generate a PDF that can be printed, emailed, or sent with whatever method you prefer.
The PDF includes a letterhead with your clinic’s and patient’s information, your clinic’s logo, and the date the document was created.
This feature also works seamlessly with the macro-autocompleter. This means you can create templates of documents ahead of time and use a macro to generate, let’s say, a sick leave letter for a patient.
Our recent AI updates have been focused on individual features such as AI Summaries and Diagnosis Suggestions. Today, we’re excited to roll out two new chart-wide, time-saving AI features: AI Referral Generation and Chart Summaries.
AI Referrals puts together a specialist referral with just a few clicks – you just need to enter the specialist concerned and the primary concern of the referral.
Atlas.md will analyze your patient’s chart and generate a referral that includes the patient’s basic information, medical history, lab results, medications, reason for referral, and more. Once you’re happy with the referral (you can edit it before you send it off), you can fax it directly to a specialist or send it via another method.
Chart Summaries does exactly what it says on the tin – summarizes a patient’s entire chart into a note that you can either send off or add directly to your patient’s chart for later review.
You can find both of these features by clicking the new AI button on your patient’s chart next to the familiar gear icon.
For a more in-depth look at how both features can save you huge amounts of time, check out our support articles on AI Referrals and Chart Summaries.
If you have any questions about AI Referrals or Chart Summaries, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@atlas.md.
