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 18, 2018

Does #directcare Have Better Quality Outcomes?

#physicianburnout is an actual hashtag that doctors are using, and some physicians are calling for a movement to make sure that burnout prevention is discussed in every meeting. But are you aware that physician burnout isn’t just some faraway concept that affects someone’s brother’s cousin’s wife? In fact, it’s a little closer than you might think, and it influences more than just the physicians.

“The U.K. researchers found that burned out physicians are twice as likely to provide unsafe care and have unprofessional behavior. They’re three times more likely to receive low patient satisfaction ratings…” (Healthcare Dive)

We didn’t need an analysis to tell us that, right? It’s a serious problem, and it’s seriously influencing the way patients get care.

But is it true what they say? That #directcare doctors provide better quality outcomes?

Well considering that a Medscape study found that “nearly two-thirds of U.S. doctors were burned out, depressed, or both” due to “EHRs and long work days…that raise their stress levels,” it makes sense that #DPC doctors are more well qualified to provide healthier care to their patients in a healthier way.

Why? Because DPC physicians don’t have the same bureaucracy, buttons to click, or boxes to check. Small, private practices have reported less instances of burnout. “Only about 13.5% of physicians in such primary care practices in New York City reported burnout, compared to the national average of 54.4%” (Healthcare Dive reported from The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine).

So the next time you’re feeling a little overextended at work, remember that you have full control of your patient scheduling, the number of patients you see, and just how deeply you let burnout creep into your practice.

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: AtlasMD

August 22, 2018

Medication Markup is Just #Crazy.

a group of people chatting They’re everywhere. Everywhere. 

At the dinner table. Around the water cooler at work. In text messages between friends… accompanied by a very cranky, red faced emoji.

They’re stories about how the markup on medication is out of this world ridiculous. They come in many shapes and sizes, but these stories are important to address. They’re the most obvious red flag that the system is very, very broken.

Take, for example, the insurance agent who recently asked for an Rx price quote for a breast cancer medicine. The patient was quoted Walgreens and CVS Pharmacy $1900 and $2200 per month…. but the Atlas MD wholesale cost $6.70. Six dollars and seventy cents. Six. Dollars. Seventy. Cents.

Yes, seriously.

It seems insane that a giant retail pharmacy would make that kind of profit, but let’s give them some grace, shall we? I mean, they have a TON of overhead costs to cover. Poor things…

Sarcasm aside, the true cost of the medicine is under seven dollars. The real problem? It’s a shell game involving the cash price for the uninsured (which is ridiculously elevated) … so that they can show a discount for insured patients.

And because of gag laws set forth by the insurance companies, the pharmacy can’t tell the patient there’s a cheaper option without being guilty of breaching their contract… and that results in a hefty fine. Legislators are working to make all this go away, but it’s happening almost too slowly to notice.

So, what we can do in the meantime to fight this injustice? The answer is simple.

Tell everyone.

Tell your patients. Tell your neighbors. Tell your dog if he’ll listen. (who are we kidding, of course he’ll listen…)

Because once they know, they can take action. And the action they’ll take will be in the direction of your DPC practice’s wholesale prices. Remember: $6.70.

Never underestimate the power of eliminating the middle man, friends. It’s the platform your practice was built on. Direct Care brings transparency to life. Maybe one day we’ll say, “Hey, remember when people used to pay thousands of dollars for medications that wholesale for under ten?” Kinda like today when we say, “Hey, remember when people thought bloodletting was a good idea for common illness?” Ugh…

So, spread the word. Show your patients the alternative value proposition you offer. Fix the problem for them, and they’ll tell everyone they know. Lather, rise, repeat!

Posted by: AtlasMD

August 15, 2018

The Smallest Improvement Will Make the Biggest Difference in Your DPC Practice.

Doctor in white coat and stethescope around neck waving with one handImprovements don’t have to be big to be earth shattering.

Your value proposition as a DPC provider is the equivalent of a very long list by this point. There is no shortage of options to pick from when it comes to improving on a traditional healthcare environment. But for the sake of argument, let’s pick the moment your patients sashay through your door. What happens then?

Your waiting room doesn’t even resemble that of a traditional setting, true. But your patients’ experience isn’t determined purely by aesthetics. It’s in the personality. That’s right. Human contact.

And here’s the thing. A little goes a long way. A very, very long way. Eye contact. A simple greeting. A how’s your day going (don’t forget to listen to the answer). A little guidance on what’s going to happen next. They may seem like obvious things to you, but when a patient comes into your clinic they probably don’t know what to expect. Comfort, yes, but kindness and attentiveness, too? Whoa. Empathy is the name of the game.

Even though you’ve lived and breathed DPC for a while now, your new patients might take a little convincing that things really are as good as they seem. So while your waiting room may have all the amenities like iPads, k-cup coffee makers, a fresh scent and the absence of another human soul with whom to make awkward eye contact, don’t forget that they’re not used to this. The first impression you make goes beyond the comfort of your waiting room and straight into human interaction.

So pay attention to the small things, like a friendly smile. We bet you’ll get one in return. And then? Let the patient-doctor relationship really commence.

Posted by: Atlas MD

August 8, 2018

Feature Review: Do You Know How Families Work in Atlas?

When you group members of a family together in Atlas, you’re treating them in the most effective way for you and them. You can enroll them together, bill them together, set a head of household who receives notifications and acts as the primary contact, and give them access to the iOS app so they can manage their billing information and even request appointments on their schedule. Need a refresher course on all that? No problem. Watch the video below, or check out the support article.

Posted by: AtlasMD

August 1, 2018

Four Ways Atlas Grows With Your DPC Practice.

New rule: Growth of any size is to be emphatically celebrated.

Did your patient panel hit a goal #? Did you get new brochures printed for companies in your area? Did you make a new contact at your local chamber? You know just as well as anyone that the little wins can be worthy of a full-blown dance party. Or meme party, depending on your mood.

You also know that Atlas is poised to grow right along with you in the nooks and crannies of day-to-day detail, and in the foundation that helps you expand to multiple locations while maintaining unity throughout your practice. So you can rock growth your way, at your own pace.

Today we want to remind you of a few more ways your Atlas.md EMR helps out with all this.

1. Labs

Atlas allows multiple lab integrations per account for all the providers it supports. This means each account can not only be integrated to different lab providers (Quest,  LabCorp and Mercy Diagnostics to name a few) but you can also have multiple accounts with each of those providers. Let’s break it down further: if your practice has multiple locations, each location can have its own Quest account. Keeps things simple and straightforward… and who doesn’t love straightforward?

One more note on the labs front – don’t forget that with the ELLKAY support we launched earlier this year there are literally very few limits to how many lab integrations can be connected to Atlas!
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