Posted by: Atlas MD

September 24, 2019

What’s New in Atlas? Forms.

Information and data are some of the most crucial modern tools being leveraged in the healthcare industry in order to deliver smarter, more informed care. Atlas’ new feature, Forms, is designed to make it easier than ever to collect and use this data.

Custom Forms

Gif of a clipboard and formWhereas traditionally doctors had to rely on manual charts and forms, now users can create custom, digital forms within Atlas for patients to fill in. Like traditional hospital checklists and flowsheets, these forms can then be answered to gather and track data over time.

The type of data gathered is entirely up to the doctor in question. Forms simply provides a blank but structured canvas that gives users complete discretion with regards to parameters of the questions they would like to ask, as well as the type of answers that they would like patients to give. It also allows for customization of the value field of the answers for greater specificity.

Gif of a question mark being resized

Once you’ve created a form, you can give it to as many patients and have it answered as many times as you like. You can then easily view and manage all of your forms and patient responses on the Forms dashboard.

Forms can also be answered outside of patient charts allowing doctors to use day-to-day checklists when running their practices.

For more details regarding forms check out our new help article, and if you have any other questions, please drop us a line at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

March 7, 2019

What’s New in Atlas? Security for Security’s Sake

DPC Security

Atlas has always taken users’ security and flexibility to heart. We want our docs to be able to work the way they want to work. Today we’re giving you even more flexibility with how you secure your data.

We’ve had two-factor authentication (2FA) in the app for a long time now, and we sincerely hope that you’ve all had that enabled and are relying on it as yet another check. But many people don’t realize that SMS–like everything these days it seems–has its own vulnerabilities. 

Modern security standards advocate for a new sort of 2FA. One that relies on really strong cryptographic calculations instead of mobile messages winging through the air. Basically you install an app on your phone or device that continually updates a passcode based on an agreed-upon handshake with Atlas. 

This is such an oversimplification it’s a bit unfair, but for the sake of brevity, that’s how you can think about it. If you really want to understand more about how it works click over here.

Atlas now supports this more secure authentication method, and we hope all of our clinics adapt it into their workflow. You’ll need to make sure all your users grab one of those apps and then enable it on your settings page. The new help article on it will walk you through all the details. We’ve even got a nice video to help a complicated thing get simple. 

We hope you’ll enjoy the new security flexibility built into this feature. It’s peace of mind that you’re doing your best to keep your patient health data as safe as it can be. In the meantime, we’ll be over here trying to explain to people the difference between MFA, 2FA, MMS, and SMS … so many acronyms these days.

Posted by: Atlas MD

February 14, 2019

What’s New in Atlas? Mentions and More!

Communication is the backbone of your business, and we’re always developing ways to help make communication between patients and colleagues even easier. With a smooth and quick mentions feature, you can now get answers or feedback even faster than before.

Mention Your Colleagues in NotesAnimated at symbol

Atlas is helping you get a little more organized. Instead of trudging through your inbox, we wanted to free up communication by letting you tag people in notes and when sending files.

Whenever you have a quick question for a doctor, need a colleague to review an item or file, or want to share a document before sending it back to your patients, you can now ping your colleagues that much faster by adding the “@” symbol before their name.

Your team members will be able to access and reply to all mentions quickly, so you can keep patient records organized and keep your practice running smoothly. Doesn’t that feel lighter?

For details on how to use mentions, check out our help article.

Interaction AnalyticsAnalytics feature

We didn’t want to stop by improving your messaging experience. We’ve also made at-a-glance stats a thing. Now you can grab all this when you export patient lists:

  • Date of 1st visit
  • Total number of chart interactions
  • Total number of prescriptions
  • Total number of appointments
  • Total number of attachments
  • Total number of diagnoses
  • Total number of tasks
  • Total number of lab results
  • Total number of calls
  • Total number of SMS Messages
  • Total number of Emails

So the next time you want to keep up with your patients, or help them keep up with you, you can make it happen with a few clicks.

Posted by: Atlas MD

November 8, 2018

What’s New in Atlas? Improvements to Enrollment, Exports and More

We’re happy to announce a whole raft of new features and improvements we’ve released this fall.

Enrollment Improvements

Patient Quick Add for Companies
We’ve added the ability for you to use the short form to quickly onboard patients that are part of a company payment plan. So when you land that new big corporate group, you can get them into Atlas just that much quicker.

Notification Email Improvements
We’ve redesigned the notification emails for new patient enrollment to include even more of the useful details you might want to know at a glance.

Sidebar Improvements

Preferred Pharmacy NumberMortar and pestle with doctor symbol
Unfortunately one of the things many doctors have to do frequently is call the pharmacy for a patient. “Missing” faxes, refills, inventory, etc. No more having to dig. Your patient’s preferred pharmacy number is now right there in the sidebar when you view their chart.

Redesigned Medical History
Patient health history is even easier to review at a glance with the newly designed format in the sidebar.

Consistent Persistent Sidebar
Now Atlas remembers how you prefer to have your sidebar as you navigate the app. Open or closed, you get to have it how you like when you like.

Export Improvements

Excel Friendly Dates in .csv Exports
We’ve improved the formatting for data in .csv exports. Now the dates are automatically recognized by Excel without any fiddling.

Billing History Export to .csv
From the detailed billing history page of a patient or a company, you can now export the data in an Excel friendly format. This is a great way to share with parties who you don’t want to have direct access to Atlas.

Company Balance Export
If you need a list of companies who owe you money, you can now get a list and a total from the Company Billing page.

Dispense History Export Improvements
We’ve improved many things about the dispense history export. Manufacturer name, branch location, and patient contact data are some of the highlights. If you ever need a list of patients who are on a certain drug, you’re one click away from having a list of phone numbers and names.

Download and Print Options for Subscription Invoices
Now you can print or download all of your subscription invoices from Atlas. Easier to share. Easier to archive.

Improved Patient Export
Now you can see upcoming appointments and the primary doctor in the patient export.

Shipping History Export
Now you can export a subset of your shipping history. Filter by branch, or date range to get exactly the data you’re looking for.

Other Improvements

Disable Drag & Drop in the Calendar
Though being able to easily rearrange your calendar was one of our core design goals, not all users like things so fluid for every account. An accidentally dragged date can lead to a missed appointment, and an upset patient. Now you can disable the feature across your entire account.

Macros on Email Drug Labels
Now the macros you know and love throughout Atlas also work on the Email Drug Labels. Streamlining your workflow and messaging to your patients even more.

Wrapping Up

We hope you love all of the improvements to Atlas.md we’ve launched this month. If you have questions or comments, please send them over to support@atlas.md for a speedy response, or drop by our Facebook group to chat about things https://www.facebook.com/groups/atlasmd/

Posted by: Atlas MD

September 4, 2018

What’s New in Atlas? Billing and Enrollment Improvements

In our ongoing efforts to let you run your clinic in the way that makes the most sense for you, we’ve launched a couple new small but large features. A checkbox here, or a radio button there can mean the difference between Atlas.md being a perfect fit, and not fitting at all for some clinics.

For the rest of us, the flexibility these features add will let us know that Atlas will continue to fit perfectly no matter how your clinic grows in the future.

Handling Fee for Prescriptions

You’ve always been able to control the prices for the medications you dispense in Atlas. But a feature that is often requested in support is to add a handling fee to the prescription. Our suggestion at support has always been to divide your handling fees across your inventory and just raise prices a bit.

That amounted to more work for some clinics, and Atlas is definitely not about making you do more work… Or math. Now you can add a handling fee for your prescriptions in Atlas.md. It’s as easy as filling in a blank under your settings. Everything else is automatic. Read more about prescription handling fees here.

Shorter Patient Enrollment Form

There’s no way around it. Eventually you have to collect a lot of data about a new patient joining your clinic. Previously that information was all collected at the time the patient joined your clinic.

But some doctors worried that they were throwing just too much at a new patient. Billing info, contact info, health history, family history, medications. On and on. It’s all vital data that you need to collect, but some doctors wanted to reduce the friction at that critical moment when a patient decides to join.

Now you can enable an abbreviated enrollment form for your patients. You can collect only those absolutely necessary bits of information needed for you to contact the patient, and initiate the billing process with them. Read more about the abbreviated patient enrollment form here.

Posted by: Atlas MD

August 28, 2018

What’s New in Atlas? Improvements to the Billing Section

DPC is such a simple concept. But still clinics find many ways to make their businesses unique. One of our most often requested category of features has to do with billing flexibility. So we’re happy to announce two of our most often requested features.

Service Fees
Though many DPC clinics operate under a subscription model, many of our users are also beginning to offer bolt-on services. Procedures and services that go above the standard subscription fee.
Though you could always make special one-off charges to patient accounts, it never quite felt built in.
This week we’re launching a new service fees section inside of your billing tab. It allows you to create these optional services and their corresponding prices.
Then when you perform the service, you can add that charge right to the patient’s invoice with a single click. Learn more about the new service charge feature here.

Enrollment Fees
Another way Atlas users are customizing their billing structure is to add an enrollment fee at the time of patient sign up. Like with Service Fees, you could always hack this with a misc. charge, but it’s better when it’s built in.

Enrollment fees have a separate billing category and have full company coverage support, so companies can decide exactly how they want to cover for their employees.

Now under Settings / Clinic Extra Charges you can specify an enrollment fee. Then when adding a new patient, adding that fee to the patient invoice is a simple checkbox during account creation. What used to be four steps is now one. Better yet, they’re broken out in billing reports so you can see just how they affect the bottom line. Read more about the new enrollment fee feature.

Posted by: Atlas MD

March 6, 2018

New EHR Study Proves U.S. Physicians Want More Time With Patients.

Physician checking boy's heartbeatInefficiency strikes again, it seems. But not how you might think.

A new study on how much time docs spend using their EHRs released its findings last month. Medscape broke it down and you can read the whole thing here if you want.

The article says EHR time exceeds patient face time in family practice visits. The study results imply that, “US [family physicians] spend more time working in the EHR than their European counterparts spend in the entire visit.”

This could very well be true for a whole lot of reasons. But we see things from another perspective. We think physicians in America are doing what they have to do in order to provide the best care possible for their patients. They’re required to document certain things a certain way, for certain (sometimes inexplicable) reasons. Sure, they could document all the things right there in the exam room with the patient. They could spend a majority of the visit staying caught up for fear of what falling behind will do to their evening (again).

But most of them don’t.

They know they only have a few sacred minutes to serve their patient well, and they want to make the most of it. So they’ll sacrifice their evening (yes, again) just so they can look their patient in the eye. Take time they don’t have to ask some quality questions and do what med school taught them.

It’s not their fault. They’re doing their best with what they have, which is limited time and a lot of mandatory paperwork. The system is broken and docs are among the victims.

These types of articles are full of numbers, and it’s good someone’s keeping track. At the end of the day, though, the results of this study give us renewed hope that more docs will opt for Direct Care instead of letting burnout get the best of them. The heart wants what the heart wants… and it’s not paperwork.

Posted by: AtlasMD

May 5, 2017

How Do You Spend Your Pajama Time?

Pajama time. You’ve heard of it, right? It’s the time most traditional docs spend at home catching up on paperwork from the day. You can just picture it. The rest of the house is asleep, the clock on the bedside table reads some insane hour, and even though all the doc wants to do is snooze after a long day, she’s propped up on a pillow shuffling papers around by nightlight.

DPC docs still have pajama time, but it looks a liiiiitle different. There may be PJ’s involved, but that’s about the end of the list of similarities. Instead of checking off boxes and pouring over paperwork to make sure billing codes are spun the right way and hasty patient scribbles (ahem, notes) are properly transcribed, DPC docs do something else entirely.

They build their business. They schedule Facebook or Twitter posts, write articles for their blog, outline their next marketing campaign strategy. Things that add value to their practice and spread the word about what they have to offer. Or maybe they do some extra research on a treatment plan they’re scheming for an unconventional patient. Or maybe they respond to a text message from a worried mother whose two year old has a rising fever.

We don’t know about you, but if we had to choose, DPC PJ time seems like the waaay better option. Just sayin’.

Posted by: AtlasMD

April 17, 2017

Being a Doc Doesn’t Have to be Lonely!

The Student Doctor Thompson has some thoughts on what it means to be the “Good Doctor.” We’re paraphrasing here, but essentially, the “Good Doctor:”

Puts in the extra time to perfect the trade. They’re always available at a moment’s notice should anyone need their help. They have a good reputation because, well, their life is medicine. Most of my fellow residents look at the Good Doctor and hate his schedule but love his legacy. He works well beyond the age of retirement and has little to no life outside of medicine. The life of a doctor is a lonely one.

Thier friends have moved on… that tends to happen after you’ve neglected them through 4 year of premed, 4 years of med school and then residency. And even if they haven’t moved on, you have nothing left in common with them.

Whoa.

Heart-wrenching, right? But what really got us is what someone posted in the comments:

“The ‘Good Doctor’ sounds like he’d be a terrible husband and father.”

Or “wife and mother” if we’re being totally PC. But that one strikes a chord, doesn’t it? The notion that in order to do your job well as a physician means you gotta sacrifice literally everything else? Yeah, we docs love medicine, but we love other stuff, too. We love cars. We love public speaking. We love books, running, and movies. We love our families. And we don’t want to sacrifice any of those things. Good thing we don’t have to. 

Direct Care docs everywhere watched this video, immediately stood up and hollered at their computer screens: “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY!” Are we right? Come on, you know we’re right.

Med school is hard. Nobody’s saying otherwise. But you’re not suffering through it just to spend endless hours filling out paperwork as part of a way to leave a legacy. You’re sacrificing now so you can help people. So we encourage you to learn more about Direct Primary Care. DPC provides you a rock solid platform and business model that literally gives you the gift of time. Time with your patients, time for yourself. Before you click off the page because it sounds too good to be true, give DPC its due diligence and read up.

* Check out the DPC Curriculum: https://atlas.md/dpc-curriculum/
* Read more of this blog: https://atlas.md/blog
* Talk to docs around the country who are doing it, and love it. https://www.iamdirectcare.com

Posted by: AtlasMD

April 12, 2017

Feature Review: Have You Tried Video Calls Yet? (Plus a Challenge.)

We’ve been dying to ask – have you tried video calls yet?? If so, fantastic! If not, we’d like to challenge you to challenge yourself to serve your patients in a new way. You might not be totally comfortable with video, and we get that, but it’s not like you’re doing Facebook Live or anything. This is just a secure conversation between you and your consenting patient that takes place over video so you can see them clearly. (Don’t rely on their panicked description of how bad that cut is. See it for yourself!)

So it’s like FaceTime, or Skype — but better! Why is it better? Because using the app’s video call feature automatically records the vitals of the call in the patient’s activity stream, showing that the conversation took place, how, when, and its duration. That’s one less thing you have to notate later; five minutes you’ve freed up to do…well, whatever you want!

This video walks you through how to initiate the call, but you can also read through the details over here in this support article.

How have video calls worked for you in your practice? Hop over to the forum and share your story! It’s a great way to get new, creative ideas on running your practice. Plus, you’ll be helping others benefit from your experience. Win-win!