Creating unique patient lists in multi-specialty office

ecavalier wrote on Sunday, May 01, 2016:

Hello,
We have 2 providers working within one office; they are completely seperate primary specialties (podiatry and neurology) with their own EIN, NPI, etc. We would like to create seperate patient lists for each doctor. We know how to add each doctor, their unique ID numbers (NPI, EIN, etc), but do not know if it is possible to truly create seperate patient lists. When using the program, only one master patient log is available and selecting any patient does not seperate them according the doctor they are seeing in our office.

Please advise if this is possible using one OpenEMR setup or would this require a unique software and server setup for each doctor. Thank you in advance for any help. If request is not clear, please ask questions so that we may attempt to clarify.

fsgl wrote on Sunday, May 01, 2016:

Sounds like you & the podiatrist are sharing office expenses & staff.

If you are reasonably certain there will be no “inimicable divorce”, you can share the same copy of OpenEMR.

If you ever need to to have separate lists of your patients & his patients, you can always run a query in patient_data with the filter for provider id.

If there is any question that a breakup will be messy, would be better to have separate installs or multi-sites.

mdsupport wrote on Sunday, May 01, 2016:

It is best to keep keep systems separate by using different ‘site’ for each specialty. Few downsides (others can chime in):

  1. Duplicate patient entry if you share patients
  2. Switching sites (and related confusion) if you share same staff making appointments
  3. Inventory maintenance will be a nightmare if you plan on tracking inventory in EMR

Realistically, these will be minor costs compared to flexibility you will gain by using multiple sites that will reflect only the forms you need showing only your patients and your billing. If you use same network and host, you will have only one set of files to maintain but two backups. And thanks to opensource, you will not pay for two licenses.

ecavalier wrote on Tuesday, May 03, 2016:

Thanks MD Suport for your recomendation. I think it will be more secure to do diferent site for each doctors.

ecavalier wrote on Tuesday, May 03, 2016:

Thanks for your recomendation. I think it will be more secure to do diferent site for each doctors.

fsgl wrote on Tuesday, May 03, 2016:

It’s nice to trust, but then one would have to verify as well.

Multi-sites will save multi-discipline practices all that trusting/verifying.

Should there be a parting of the ways, the transition will be smoother.

The best of luck to you both.