Dr. Petrie is not your typical practitioner – his practice focuses on TRAVEL AND HEALTH IMMUNIZATIONS AND CONSULTATION. In addition he holds a certificate in travel health, a unique degree for a doctor of pharmacy. As such, his practice has specific needs and when he decided to implement an EHR into his practice, he needed something that was full-featured, yet flexible enough to meet his unique needs.
After trying two different EHRs, Dr. Petrie was left frustrated – as his practice was growing, the EHRs he initially found were not making practice management any easier for him. He had to add more and more staff and was repeatedly going through the EHR training process over and over again.
He needed an EHR that was intuitive and easy-to-use, and that could allow his practice to grow without having to increase his staff.
Dr. Louis Petrie opened his practice six years ago as a stand-alone clinic focusing on immunization, travel health, and advanced vaccination services.
“We offer a daily access to all immunization, travel consultations, travel health supplies, and travel medicines. My goal is to prevent the spread of illness and to keep travelers and people in his communtiy healthy!”
In addition to his doctorate degree, Petrie works in collaboration practice model along with other physician to promote wellness.
Dr. Petrie needed a flexible EHR that could support both general practice procedures as well as those unique to travel medicine.
“About four years ago I decided to embark on making things simpler and more streamlined for my practice, and decided to implement an EHR. Initially, we tried an EHR called ‘vaxis EHR’ which was specifically geared for travel health.
As my practice grew, however, I realized that there were too many limitations with vaxis. Because they focused only on travel health, they had no ability to do the type of insurance billing that we needed on a daily basis. We ended up in a situation where we were constantly trying to push the program and make it do things that it wasn't really designed to do.
That was when I knew we needed to make a change - but I had no idea to what…”
Initially, Dr. Petrie’s searched ended when he found an EHR called Office Ally.
“We started with Office Ally, which provided a strong billing package and a reasonable electronic medical records systems. In the course of a year or two, as we were growing, we found that we were growing ourselves into a circle. The way Office Ally was set up (as we were growing and our patient volume was increasing) it was simply not keeping up and we had to hire more staff to simply run the system.
Simply put, it wasn't making things any easier! The only workaround was to add more labor. At some point, as we looked at our business we said, ‘we can't continue to grow our business if every time we grow we have to add more staff.’”
At that point, Dr. Petrie realized it was time to find a permanent EHR solution that can support his practice as it grows.
“We looked at many different cloud based systems, because we didn't want to spend for the infrastructure and everything we were doing was cloud based. We also go to clinics so we needed access through the web - that was when we came across CharmHealth EHR
Dr. Petrie had two main criteria that needed to be met in his search for a new EHR.
“Number one, the EHR needed to have an intuitive interface such that a simple medical assistant can operate the system as well as a physician.
Number two, it had to be cloud-based and accessible on multiple devices.
“Finally, it had to have the ability to allow patients access and management of their own medical encounters.”
We literally looked at every EHR before settling on CharmHealth EHR which met our needs perfectly!”
Dr. Petrie was able to get his practice quickly up and running with CharmHealth EHR.
“We found CharmHealth EHR 10 months ago and haven't really looked back since. We gave it a three month evaluation period, and as soon as we found how easy and intuitive it was to use, while having all of the features that a an EHR needs, we knew we had a winner.”
In addition to finding an EHR that met his criteria, Dr. Petrie had an additional reason to stick with CharmHealth EHR.
“Soon after implementation, we had an initial conversation with a CharmHealth EHR representative and the CEO of the company, and I saw first-hand that there was a real commitment to making an amazing EHR that works. They made distinct promises and they fulfilled all of them.”
The clinic had an interesting workflow challenge that CharmHealth EHR was able to fulfill through customization. The clinic administers vaccines in a large proportion of encounters, and wanted to manage the inventory tracking of vaccines, the chart note entry, the synchronization with the California Immunization Registry, and the invoicing/billing, all in one seamless workflow. CharmHealth EHR was able to accomplish this to Dr. Petrie's satisfaction.
Since implementing CharmHealth EHR, Dr. Petrie's office has seen a noticeable increase in efficiency and ease-of-use.
“We were able to immediately customize it to our needs. They are constantly working to add even more functionality while keeping the ease-of-use intact. Ease of patient access, the ability to use tablets, get on to the web, and self enroll is very nice.
My staff has also found it incredibly easy to use compared to the other two EHRs we previously tried. We even have students who have picked it up very rapidly.
We didn't have to compromise to use CharmHealth EHR - on the contrary, our workflow has elevated to a much more streamlined, timely way because we are able to utilize the aspects of the system that are important to us without having to mess around with other things that we don't care about which was what the experience was like with other EHRs.”
“I would absolutely, hands down recommend CharmHealth EHR! They are highly responsive to customer feedback, and really ‘get it’ when it comes to user experience. They have all the bells and whistles without the complicated interface.”