Do you know your EHR’s uptime? You should.

Depending on the EHR you go with it is important to know when your EHR is up. If you go with drchrono or some other vendor make sure that servers is up at least 99% of the time. Demand that your EHR share this information with you in some format. Click here to see drchrono’s uptime.

We at drchrono pride ourselves on uptime, giving you access to your data 24/7.

There might be a time that you can’t get to your EHR provider, the best way to check on this information is with the tools below.

If you can’t get to your cloud EHR provider, please your internets health.

1. Check your internets upload and download speeds. Healthy?
2. Internet Health Map, this website show the internet backbone’s of the world and the status of them. What is a backbone? Think of it as the main provider of internet in your region, if they go down, you might have connectivity issues.
3. Internet Health Report, a report showing the status of the world’s largest Internet Service Providers and their health.
4. Internet Traffic Report, a report showing local regions of internet and its health.
5. Use Traceroute to check how many hops it takes to get to the drchrono platform, everything seem good?
6. Use ping to check that the EHR service is even up. Try it.

One thing we recommend at drchrono is getting redundant backups of internet, one example is having an internet provider and getting Verizon or AT&T service on you iPads. Another alternative is to get internet from an internet provider and a Mi-Fi.

Mi-Fi’s are super cool, you can go anywhere and have internet on your laptops and iPads and other devices. Another option is to have two main internet providers, one through coaxial cable (e.g. comcast) and the other through your phone lines (e.g. AT&T).

Really Touching Data

Opened in 2006, the House of Sweden is a stunning contemporary building that houses both the Swedish and Icelandic Embassies in Washington DC’s Georgetown. The front of the building, comprised of a towering glass facade, provides visitors with a full-scale view of the clean lines of the interior architecture and the workings of the occupants. The four storey building was designed specifically to foster an atmosphere of positive and creative cooperation. The architects envisioned unusual features in an embassy — a combination of openness and transparency.

The building’s architectural elements translate into the technological approaches of Sweden more generally (i.e., their influence in the Open Source movement). Additionally, the spirit of the relationship between technology and medicine is captured beautifully in the Virtual Autopsy Project, an academic-industrial partnership that led to the development of a new commercialized product called the Sectra Visualization Table. In early 2010, the Embassy hosted an exhibit of home-grown technologies that I was lucky enough to see when I was biking around Georgetown and stopped in to check out the exhibit hall.

A dining room table-sized touch screen (basically a giant iPad) obscuring a giant CPU with plywood and tablecloths (this was a prototype) allowed users to interact in with 3-D images generated by CT and MRI scans. Developed at Sweden’s Center for Medical Science and Visualization, the table demonstrated how visualization can serve medical education, screening, and diagnostics.

While a rite of passage for a first-year medical student is a cadaver dissection, the availability of virtual cadavers may enhance opportunities for investigation and thankfully limit the time a student has to withstand the odor of formaldehyde in a dissection lab. The Swedish research team has also demonstrated the potential of touchscreen technologies in clinical care, especially in specialties like cardiology, neurology, surgery, orthopedics, and veterinary medicine. As touchscreen devices reach ubiquity in clinical medicine, there is a world of opportunity for developers of these tools and and expanding toolkits for their users.

Facebook Page Apps Every Medical Practice Should Use

Ever doctor who is “in” is now using facebook pages to improve communication with patients. Though the number of facebook apps available to do this is in the well over 100,000, too many for physician to look through.

Start here to build out the tools for your medical practice. The goal of every doctor using facebook pages is to give information to new and existing patients, also get patients to engage with the physician in a social supportive way.

Below are five essential Facebook apps.

1. Twitter Tab — Display Your Twitter Feed

Twitter Tab, which has 1+ million monthly active users, will create a tab on your Facebook Page that displays a timeline of your medical practices most recent tweets. This is a great feature for providing additional, real-time information to Facebook patients and medical staff who don’t have a Twitter account and for avoiding the annoyance your fans would feel if you were to constantly stream your tweets to Facebook as wall updates. The app is very easy to set up.

2. Static HTML: iframe Tabs — Create a Custom Landing Page

Static HTML: iframe tabs, which has 61+ million monthly users, will simplify the process of making a custom landing page by automating many of the steps. Forget about creating a developer account and your own application — this app provides copy and paste textboxes for your custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It also offers checkboxes to remove the scrollbars. If you want to incentivize Likes on your Page, the application enables you to “like-gate,” and show different content to those who have and haven’t “liked” your page.

It’s worth noting that you will still need to host your own files, and designs over 520 pixels wide and 800 pixels tall will have the scrollbars.

3. EHR online facebook scheduling — Place you free appointment schedule on Facebook

Let patients schedule appointments in a HIPAA compliant way!  Use the Static HTML iframe Tabs to get this done.

Step by step instructions on how to do this can be found here.

4. ContactMe — Add a Contact Form

ContactMe, with 180,000 monthly active users, adds a tab on your organization’s Facebook Page with a contact form. This allows anyone visiting your Facebook page to easily get in touch with you at the very moment when they’re most interested.

The biggest advantage of this app is its customization options. You can choose whether you’d prefer to show your company’s contact information or social media icons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Skype. This is very customizable.

5. RSS Graffiti – Automatically Post Updates

RSS Graffiti, with 1.5 million monthly users, allows you to automatically post wall updates any time there’s a new item in one of your specified feeds. For example, if you publish to a medical blog every day, RSS Graffiti can automatically post an excerpt of the article with a direct link onto your Facebook page’s wall. That saves you the time and effort of creating a new wall update every day to distribute your company’s content.

It has customization options making it stand out. You can automatically post more than one RSS feed, adjust how the post looks when published, schedule how often the feed is checked, and specify how many posts should be published per check. And most importantly, with all these options and more, the configuration interface is still easy to use and intuitive.

Create a Medical Practice Google+ Business Page

Google just released Pages for business in its Google+ social network.

There are a number of benfits to having a Google+ page for your medical practice, many are the same reasons for having Pages on facebook.

• Direct connection to Googles search engine Through the use of the “+1″ button, Google has tied Google+ directly to its search. There is also a feature currently under experimentation called “Direct Connect” that will allow searchers to find Google+ business pages directly from search.
• Better audience segmentation  Google+ circles gives businesses a better way to segment audiences, which means messaging can become more relevant and timely.
• Face-to-face connection with patients, employees, and the world The live, streaming video component of the platform, Hangouts, enables businesses to create live, virtual face-to-face connections with potential patients and others.

So how do you create a Google+ Page?

1. Go to the Google+ Business Page and click the blue “Create Your Google+ Page” button
2. Pick a relevant business category and add your information. The categories to choose from are: “Local Business or Place,” “Product or Brand,” “Company, Institution or Organization,” “Arts, Entertainment or Sports,” and “Other.”
3. Add a tagline, upload a profile banner, click the “Continue” button and your page is created.

Reorder Custom Templates on iPad

The latest version of our platform can now customize the display order (i.e. list) of custom templates when on the iPad. To do this go here to see this new option.