i am in a sole proprietor’s office, solo medical practice with about 7 yrs of practice ahead of him. we currently use medisoft - which is not a great program. we file paper claims. we need to upgrade to file electronically and perhaps allow our physician to type or dictate his office notes. we have many medicare patients - but lots from other carriers also. so, what about switching from medisoft to this open access program? can we transfer the data from medisoft ‘as is’? is this program truly a flexible user-friendly device? is it reasonable that office personnel can learn linux when we have only used microsoft-type programs. we are reasonably computer savvy - but NOT youngsters. thanks in advance!
Conversion will doubtless be the biggest challenge. I’ve recently converted a client from Medical Manager but am not familiar with Medisoft. Much depends on what you want to convert (just patient demographics? appointments? billing history?), and whether you can extract/export the info from Medisoft in a reasonably understandable and machine-readable form.
The user interface is a web browser, so there’s no need for office personnel to learn Linux. You will want a Linux-savvy person to maintain the server, or else some sort of maintenance contract for it and a backup plan.
What you might want to do is set up a server and try it out, and then decide if you want to bite the conversion bullet. Send me an email if you’d like to talk about a preconfigured machine.
I agree with the suggestion of RAID 1 or better, and a CD burner for daily backups. Over time you will accumulate a nice stack of CDs which can double as an audit trail of sorts.
However I don’t think running a practice on a $50 cast-off computer is a good idea. Fast response times and reliability are both very important, and if you know what to look for a new server-class machine is very reasonably priced.