Posted by: Atlas MD

July 19, 2022

What’s New in Atlas.md? Text Formatting.

No one likes reading walls of text. To help make notes more readable and better organize your thoughts, we’ve introduced text formatting.

This means you can now use bolding, italics, lists, and more to make your notes easier to read. Check out this Text Formatting Guide we put together to better understand how this content formatting works. For those of you familiar with Markdown formatting, this will be a breeze!

We’re confident that text formatting will make jotting down notes and sending instructions (among other things) that much easier and more effective.

If you have any questions about how text formatting works, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

July 13, 2022

What’s New in Atlas.md? Save Draft Function, Custom Form Notes, and Macros for Lab Data.

In this next round of updates, we’ve turned our attention to improving the custom notes function that many of our users use to document patient well-being and provide updates to other medical professionals.

Save draft function

For added peace of mind when writing notes, we’ve introduced a way of actively saving anything you’ve already written. While notes already have an autosave feature, the ability to actively save drafts means you can decide when exactly you want to save your drafts, giving you control over when you want to save your work, and allowing you to come back to unfinished notes. Pending drafts will be visible in the header of your patients’ charts, so you can easily find any notes you were working on.

Custom form notes

When emailing forms to your patients, you may want to go into specific details about the form, particular conditions, or any other instructions. With custom form notes you can easily add a short, customized note that will accompany the email to your patient with the link to the form. The custom note has macros integration so you can automate commonly-used instructions or observations.

Macros for lab data

In order to provide easier ways to reference data points from imported lab results, we’ve now integrated Atlas.md’s macro autocompleter. This means you can now use the macro shortcuts #trend and #result to pull up the latest results for your patients. 

For example, if you want to reference the latest lab result concerning Triglycerides, you can type “#resulttrig” and Atlas.md will search for all matching data points.

This streamlines the process of attaching lab results to patient charts, as well as emailing report notes to patients and other doctors.

And that’s it! We’re really excited and confident that these notes will make your job that much easier. If you have any questions about how any of these updates work, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

June 28, 2022

What’s New in Atlas.md? Custom Appointment Notes, More Appointment Recurrence Options, and Emergency Contact Categorization.

Summer is finally here, and along with the sunshine we have a number of feature updates to share. We’ve focused the lion’s share of our efforts on improving features related to appointments, and we’re confident that these updates will make scheduling consultations that much more efficient.

Custom appointment notes

When creating appointments or notifying patients you may want to go into a little more detail about what the patient can expect from the appointment. With custom appointment notes you can now easily add a short customized note so that your patients are better informed about any upcoming consultations. These notes also work with macros integration, a powerful tool that allows you to create templates for your most-used appointment notes.

New appointment recurrence options

We’ve also extended the number of available recurrence options for appointments. Before, appointments could only recur on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. Now, we’ve added 14-, 21-, and 28-day recurrences to repeating appointments for greater flexibility when scheduling consultations.

Emergency contact categorization

In an emergency, it’s important to have as much information as possible. With that in mind, we wanted to make it easy to classify the relationship between a patient and their emergency contact(s). With emergency contact categorization, you can now easily specify this relationship in your patient’s chart.

That’s it for now. We have some more updates coming very soon, but in the meantime, we hope these features improve your Atlas.md experience. If you have any questions about any of the updates, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

June 8, 2022

How the DPC Model is Changing Dentistry

It’s no secret that the DPC movement has made huge strides in its goals of forever changing American healthcare. Healthcare services that would have put patients out of pocket thousands of dollars – and that’s even before taking into consideration hefty insurance premiums and copays – are now obtainable for less than $100 per month. 

This revolution in direct care – and revolution is the correct word here – has been nothing short of astonishing – and now it’s spreading to other forms of previously inaccessible healthcare too.

The problem with dental

Dentistry has long been a major, often prohibitive, expense for many people in the US. The prices even for basic checkups are out of reach for so many Americans. Many put off going to the dentist for months or even years, often until they’re in so much pain from an existing problem that they make compromises in other areas of their life to afford an appointment.

Let’s take a look at the cost of average dental treatments in the US:

  • Cleaning, check-up and x-rays – $200-$400
  • Implant and crown – $3000-$6000
  • Root canal – $700-$1300
  • Whitening – $300-$500
  • Bridge – $2000-$6000

These prices are without insurance, but even with insurance, the out-of-pocket contribution that patients have to pay is astronomical. Since traditional dental insurance caps at an annual maximum of between $1,000 to $2,000, plus copayments for all major services, patients will almost always be facing lofty bills.

This is bad for patients, but it’s bad for dentists too, as it discourages patients from booking appointments until absolutely necessary, ultimately resulting in fewer visits.

Direct Care for dentists

Because of the costs involved in dental care, and the disadvantages it presents for both patients and healthcare practitioners, many are starting to see how the benefits of Direct Care and in-office patient membership plans can be applied to the industry.

Like DCP clinics, they offer a number of plans for individuals, small businesses, and larger organizations. 

Membership fees start at $20/month, including up to two oral exams, teeth cleaning and x-rays, as well as a 30%-45% discount on other procedures such as crowns, fillings, implants, etc.

For dentists, this opens access to a whole new panel of patients, those who previously had no dental insurance, such as retirees or the self-employed. It also offers a chance to build loyalty with patients of all ages and, more importantly, retain those patients for years to come.

The DPC model is the future of healthcare

As more healthcare professionals realize the benefits that the Direct Care model affords their businesses and patients, it’s likely that in addition to primary care and dentistry, other fields such as psychiatry and psychotherapy could adopt similar models. 

The secret lies in not only spreading the word about the inherent advantages of the DPC model but by letting the increased savings and quality healthcare that patients receive speak for themselves. 

Posted by: Atlas MD

April 20, 2022

What’s New in Atlas.md? Import LabCorp Results.

Last year we released the Import Lab Results feature that made it possible to move test results from labs directly into Atlas.md as discrete data. The feature allowed you to view test results as tabular data instead of just a static PDF, but it only worked with lab results from Quest Diagnostics.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve extended the capabilities of the feature to work with results from LabCorp. This means you can now effortlessly import lab results into Atlas.md from two of the country’s largest labs providers.

For a more detailed explanation of how the feature works, please check out our help article on the subject, and if you’re unsure about how to request labs, you can find out more here. 

Finally, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

March 16, 2022

Help Employer Groups Put Employees First With Atlas Consult

It’s no secret that employers can save enormous amounts of money by shifting their employee healthcare away from the fee-for-service model and towards direct primary care.

Since traditional providers get paid for every patient they see, it’s in their financial interest to manage chronic conditions rather than curing them. Not to mention that when they do see patients, the appointments are rushed, with symptom management being the primary concern rather than diagnosing the root cause of a condition.

In fact, primary care doctors actually avoid addressing root causes and often refer patients to specialists to protect them from liability claims.

These specialists, it goes without saying, are prohibitively expensive, all of which funnels back into a company’s bottom line, driving up healthcare costs and driving down profits.

But what if there was a system that allows an employer to get the best of both worlds for their employees? Preventative, direct primary care with a physician, and affordable access to specialists when they require an outside consultation?

Save more with Consult

That was exactly our thought when we built Atlas Consult. We wanted to create a way for doctors to consult specialists whenever they need a second opinion about a diagnosis that requires expert advice – but without the exorbitant price tag.

Deployed at scale, the increased savings for employer groups, over and above the savings from switching to DPC, are huge. It means that employers can keep their workforces healthy at a fraction of the cost of traditional healthcare and that employees have access to specialist medicine and healthcare when they need it – prioritizing prevention, rather than intervention.

The best part about Consult is that it’s a continually expanding database that gets more powerful with each new specialist that enrolls. It’s constantly growing, meaning that access to specialist knowledge increases every day.

It’s beneficial for all parties involved – doctors who want a second opinion, specialists who get paid for remote consultations, patients who receive better care and better outcomes, and employers who save massively while putting the health of their employees first.

Posted by: Atlas MD

March 9, 2022

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

Scheduling patient appointments is a time-consuming affair, often requiring nurses, secretaries, or other administrative staff to coordinate and manage. Our newest feature, self-scheduling, gives you the option to allow patients to schedule their own appointments ahead of time, drastically reducing the administrative burden required to schedule consultations.

Self-scheduling doesn’t have to replace your preferred booking process. You can still schedule appointments as you normally would while also providing patients with the possibility to book their own consultations. Atlas.md will automatically make sure that there are no schedule conflicts so that you can spend more time worrying about what matters most – providing quality care.

The rollout of self-scheduling doesn’t mean that you’re going to be suddenly swamped with appointments without your knowledge. Users have full control over whether they want to enable self-scheduling, how far in advance they would like bookings, the length of appointments, and how many daily time slots they want to open up. This isn’t limited to doctors either; any user, including administrative staff and nurses, can enable self-scheduling so that patients can book procedures such as labs, tests, or vaccinations directly with the relevant member of staff.

We’re constantly working on ways to give users more options to manage their clinics in a way that makes sense to them, and self-scheduling is another tool to do that while enabling even more flexibility and customization.

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

Posted by: Atlas MD

February 15, 2022

It’s Been a Good Year for Direct Primary Care

As the second year of the pandemic comes to a close, it’s as good a time as any to take stock of 2021 and examine how the direct primary care industry has fared during these strange times. As it turns out, 2021 was a fantastic year for DPC on the whole. Growth was steady as new clinics opened across the country and more patients than ever were able to get access to better, affordable healthcare. Moving into 2022, it’s clear that direct care has never been better, stronger, more innovative, or more in demand.

Pushed to the limit

It’s no secret that doctors were already under immense strain before Covid-19, but since the start of the pandemic, the pressures on the public healthcare system and the medical professionals that staff it have been nothing short of staggering. Not only has this led to lower quality of care across the board, but physicians already suffering from burnout associated with overworking and excessive hospital administration were pushed to their limits as hospitals struggled to cope with an influx of patients and sick medical staff. This resulted in a phenomenon termed the “Great Resignation”, which saw vast numbers of healthcare professionals leaving in droves. In August 2021 alone, more than 534,000 people left the healthcare industry, causing huge disruptive turnover among primary care providers.

Pandemic-proof 

The same can’t be said for direct care. The telehealth capabilities inherent in most DPC practices meant that doctors were able to continue providing safe and effective treatment for their patients throughout the worst of the pandemic. They could keep their doors open while others had to shut, and at the same time operate under comparatively less stress due to working with significantly smaller patient panels and attending to less administrative work than traditional clinics.

Many doctors saw the benefits of this model and steered their ships in that direction, opening up direct care practices across the country even in the midst of mutating variants. While there is no official registry of DPC practices and the available data can sometimes be difficult to parse out, information gathered by DPC mapper and the DPC Alliance demonstrates a steady increase in the number of DPC clinics throughout the country. 

Paving the way forward 

2021 was also a great year for DPC legislation. In South Dakota and Montanna, legislation amending the definition of DPC as “not insurance” was passed, and bill SB374 was enacted allowing healthcare providers in Montana to dispense medications directly to their patients. Bills to pave the way for easier DPC access were also submitted in South Carolina, Texas, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

In demand

The reputation of and demand for DPC has also grown tremendously in the last year, as evidenced by the ever-increasing articles on the subject in well-known publications. A consumer survey by Hint Health also found that 83% of employees in the U.S. would be likely to sign up for direct primary care (DPC) membership if offered by their employer, and a study published in Population Medicine found that in general family medicine physicians were open to the idea of direct care, and felt that “DPC can offer positive outcomes through lower administrative burden for physicians, improved doctor-patient relationships, and better access.”

Conclusion

It’s clear that direct care is heading in the right direction, and industry growth on a physical, legislative, and reputational level experienced in 2021 reflects this. There’s no reason to believe that this momentum can’t be sustained into 2022 and that by moving one foot purposefully in front of the other, DPC can gain a firmer foothold and continue improving healthcare throughout the country.

Posted by: Atlas MD

February 8, 2022

What’s New in Atlas.md? Shipping Labels for Companies.

Last year we made a lot of improvements to our shipping processes in order to make it easier to dispense refills and ship packages to patients. Today, we’re rolling out similar enhancements to shipping functionalities for companies.

Now, you can quickly and easily order shipping and print shipping labels to have packages sent to companies, while Atlas.md takes care of all the administrative heavy lifting. It’s just another way we’re broadening our scope of services while simultaneously lessening the amount of paperwork you have to pay attention to.

To learn more about shipping packages and medication, check out this support article. And if you have any questions regarding shipping labels, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@atlas.md.

Posted by: Atlas MD

January 27, 2022

Changes to Carrier Messaging Regulations

In recent months, cell carriers in the US have been taking steps to limit spam being sent on their networks, especially with regards to text messages involving drug sales. In a move to further prohibit these types of communications, almost all US carriers have introduced hefty fines for any non-compliant text messages being sent over their networks.

What does this mean for doctors who make their bread and butter communicating about medicine and drugs to patients, doctors, and other medical professionals? It’s tough to know right now. It’s also difficult to know how strictly these new rules will be enforced, but we will be keeping a close eye on the situation to see how it develops and do our best to keep you updated with the latest.

These types of broad policy changes are outside of our control, but we do understand how frustrating they can be. If there’s any way that we can help or if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@atlas.md.