A Day in the Life of a Doctor and an iPad: A Tale of Romance made possible by DrChrono.com

My iPad alarm soothingly wakes me from my slumber, and I head to the shower where I belt out Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” echoing from my iTunes set list. After a few good “oh ooo ohhhhhh’s”, I’m on my way to work and I check my real-time schedule via my iPad and DrChrono.com’s luxurious layout, and I see that my first appointment at 9:00 A.M. had rescheduled and my 9:15 wasn’t there yet. Seizing this opportunity, I use my iPad to locate the nearest Starbucks drive through, and I stylishly pick up a Venti Iced Coffee with heavy cream, something I like to call a “Mairéad”. A few sips and I’m feeling energized, and oddly enough my iPad harmoniously looks perkier too. It’s as though we’re feeding off of each other, but then I decide that’s a little too strange for me to consider this early in the morning.

Arriving at my clinic, I greet my delightful staff as I head to my office to settle in. My iPad alerts me that my first patient is roomed and ready to be seen. It is a follow-up appointment for high blood pressure, so I tap my iPad screen once on the patient’s name as I walk to the exam room and I see that their blood pressure today is 150/92. My patient’s vital signs were entered via my web-based practice management program DrChrono.com by my medical assistant! They were also stored permanently for review at the last clinic visit, so I quickly tap a button to view that at his last visit his blood pressure was 148/88 and that the new medication I added at our last visit 4 weeks ago was not working as well as I had hoped. So I tap another button on my iPad to access my e-Prescribing tool, and I send a quick prescription to the patient’s pharmacy while counseling the patient on dietary modifications and the benefits of exercise to lower blood pressure. Before you know it, my 9:15 appointment is over before you can say “iPad EMR/iPad Point-of-Care Application”. I’m beginning to fall in love if I haven’t already. Love is so complicated, isn’t it?

On to my next patient who has only been waiting two minutes, I walk in and at this point sarcastically apologize for being late. My patient smiles, knowing my humor well and the fact that I always boast about my iPad being more efficient than me. This playful banter is what keeps our relationship so strong. I’m talking about my iPad and I, not my patient, of course. My iPad seems to chuckle. So cute.

I rapidly bring up my patient’s X-ray of his Boxer’s fracture he sustained a week ago when he punched a concrete wall out of frustration that his mom wouldn’t buy him a new iPad. Feeling his pain, I let him play around with my iPad a little bit, but not for long since I didn’t want him to hurt himself again out of excitement. On the crystal clear iPad screen with amazing quality for X-ray reading, we see that his fracture is beginning to heal without any new injuries. We replace his splint with a cast. The iPad is a fantastic tool, but it can’t replace a doctor’s hands.

When you start talking about note-taking, the DrChrono.com system is second to none. Actually, it’s not even second to none, because we are the only native iPad application out there for practice management and electronic medical records. So let me start over…even if it was not the only practice management and EMR software program out thereon the iPad, our patient encounter note-taking would be second to none. It has voice-recorded dictations that can be transcribed to readable format, voice-to-text recognition via the microphone built into the iPad, Macros-enabled functionality, stylus-enabled note-taking by hand, or you can hook up a keyboard to the iPad for easy typing if so desired. Never has any single practice out there had so many technological tools at their fingertips as with DrChrono.com’s native iPad EMR application and practice management solution.

As if I’m not analytical enough as it is, now I have DrChrono.com to analyze my practice. Insurance payment information, patients with outstanding balances, pie graphs, spreadsheets, and more to help my office staff minimize their overwhelming paperwork. For me it provides a great summary of where my practice is and where it is successfully heading. The most assuring thing is that DrChrono.com is always updating their product. It seems that every week there is new functionality coming out to minimize work, increase efficiency, and promote optimal patient care.

As much as my love has grown for the iPad, the reason for this love is simple. It is an indirectly manifested type of love, a love that is based on the love for my patients.

Flawlessly, my day had become a well-orchestrated smooth-running machine with every patient encounter, every e-prescription, every superbilling experience melts into my fingers from the iPad and tastes so good, like licking your fingers after eating salty, buttery popcorn. Having a heart attack? There’s an app for that. Well, maybe one day…