Posted by: Atlas MD

July 2, 2024

What’s New in Atlas.md? Self-Scheduling Links With SMS.

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.

You can find out more about how this feature works in our support article on the subject.

If you have any questions about self-scheduling via SMS, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

June 17, 2024

Why Trust Is the Cornerstone of Successful DPC Models

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.

These facts are increasingly at odds with the status quo, where there’s a clear lack of trust in public health, with many patients feeling that healthcare has declined rather than improved in recent years.

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.

Posted by: Atlas MD

May 22, 2024

What’s New in Atlas.md? Improved AI Referrals and Chart Summaries.

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.

Posted by: Atlas MD

May 8, 2024

What’s New in Atlas.md? Atlas.md Mobile.

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.

Learn more about Atlas.md Mobile

Download Atlas.md Mobile for iPhone

If you have any questions about Atlas.md Mobile, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

May 6, 2024

Why Big Business Simply Can’t Cut It In Healthcare

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. 

The numbers are pretty crazy. Amazon scooped up One Medical for $3.9 billion, CVS acquired Oak Street Health for $10.6 billion, and Walgreens sunk over $6 billion into VillageMD

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:

The DPC Success Story

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.

Posted by: Atlas MD

April 16, 2024

What’s New in Atlas.md? Streamlined Enrollment Billing.

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.

Posted by: Atlas MD

March 28, 2024

What’s New in Atlas.md? Letterheads.

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.

Check out our support article for more details.

And if you have any questions about Letterheads, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

February 22, 2024

What’s New in Atlas.md? AI Referrals and Chart Summaries.

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.

Posted by: Atlas MD

January 26, 2024

How AI Is Liberating Doctors From Tedious Administration Work

There’s no question that the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is in the process of revolutionizing healthcare. Whether it’s reading medical images, X-rays, and scans, making sense of huge amounts of data to help diagnoses, or creating treatment plans, the scope of what AI can do in a medical context is staggering.

While this pace of change can seem intimidating, it’s actually a game-changer for doctors seeking to focus on their true passion – delivering quality patient care.

This is the whole reason we built Atlas.md – to reduce tedious administrative tasks and free up more time for you to do what you love. 

AI is just another tool allowing us to do this. Whether it’s summarizing transcripts, creating SOAP notes, or using AI macros, our goal is to have you doing as little “work about work” so that you can spend as much time being a doctor as possible. 

In the day-to-day of running a medical practice, this means getting rid of tedious administrative tasks that would otherwise take hours to churn through.

The reverberation of this trend has been felt across all industries burdened by excessive administrative work – status updates, cross-departmental communication, and everything else that isn’t part of the core, professional raison d’etre. 

It makes sense that the deployment of AI would mean fewer humans doing this type of work  – and it’s already taking place.

Recently, ResumeBuilder surveyed 750 business leaders using AI and found that 37% of them said the technology had replaced at least some workers in 2023. 44% of them said that AI would be the cause of layoffs in 2024. 

For some, this might be a cause for alarm, but for others, it’s the necessary and inevitable streamlining of tasks that exist around actual work. 

How does this relate to your own work as a doctor?

Think about how your day-to-day used to look when you worked at a hospital. Endless forms, red tape, suffocating paperwork – the opportunity cost of this work (as opposed to seeing patients) is enormous. 

Traditional healthcare has turned doctors from complex clinical thinkers into clerks and typists. Not that there’s anything wrong with those professions – it’s just not the reason you went to a decade of medical school.

At face value, AI tools mean liberation from the mundane tasks that accompany every patient visit. 

It means you’ll spend more time with a stethoscope in your hand than a pen and paper.

It means less time doing clerical admin, and more time helping the world.

Posted by: Atlas MD

January 23, 2024

What’s New in Atlas.md? Diagnosis Suggestions.

It’s sometimes tough to deal with the January blues – the holiday season’s over, there’s still a few more months of winter ahead, and everyone’s back to work. To make things a little better and work a little easier, we’re happy to announce a new feature – AI Diagnosis Suggestions.

Hot on the heels of other AI releases (AI Summaries and SOAP Notes, and AI Macros), this feature recommends possible diagnoses based on the information available in your patient’s chart.

By analyzing recent notes and looking for relevant keywords and ICD-10 codes, this feature identifies and suggests a list of the most likely diagnoses for your patient.

Now, instead of having to trawl through your notes after a patient consultation to determine a diagnosis, Atlas.md saves you time by doing the heavy lifting for you.

When adding a new diagnosis, you’ll notice a new heading called Suggestions. Select one of the possible diagnoses from the list and it’ll get added to your patient’s chart.

One click. Huge amounts of time saved. It’s that easy!

If you have any questions about AI Diagnosis Suggestions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at support@atlas.md.