Success Stories

Total Health and Wellness Center Digs Out of Paper Avalanche with RAPID EMR Software System

When Dr. Doug Arvanitis opened his Tampa Bay-area practice in 1997, one of his first moves was to acquire a workflow system to minimize manual activity during and after patient encounters and therapy sessions, as well as to manage patient and insurer billing.

There was still lot of busy work however, and the doctor often found himself spending evenings assembling notes and compiling reports at home after long days in the office. But in mid-2003, he cut manual activity to a minimum with the acquisition of RAPID EMR, an electronic medical records solution from the Healthcare Business Division of ACOM Solutions, Inc.

Broad-based, progressive practice
A graduate of Ohio State University and Life Chiropractic College, Dr. Arvanitis founded Total Health and Wellness Centers in 2000 with partner Ray Campos, a fitness center operator and consultant. The practice/company currently consists of three offices, all located in fitness centers in the Tampa-Clearwater area. Staff includes three chiropractors, a neurosurgeon, five licensed massage therapists, two marketing persons and a certified therapist who focuses on rehabilitation. A data network connects the three offices with a central computing platform.

The practice is broadly based, treating patients ranging from professional athletes to personal injury victims and workers compensation cases to walk-ins with backaches. THWC is the team chiropractor for various local sports teams and Dr. Arvanitis is the personal chiropractor for several professional baseball and football players and three boxing title holders.

Exploring solutions, making a choice
Before the acquisition of RAPID EMR, virtually the entire clinical staff was involved in a two/three-stage process. Professionals and therapists recorded their exams, analyses and treatments on daily note forms created for their specific responsibilities in the practice. The front office entered the charges indicated and forwarded the necessary documents to insurance companies and other concerned parties. Reports involved not only the diagnostics and therapeutic facts of the case but also the practitioner’s expert opinion and prognosis. Reports routinely required hours of reading, analyzing and dictating as many as 20 pages of text.

By the time Dr. Arvanitis encountered RAPID EMR, he had already evaluated several solutions for cutting the back office and professional paperwork load -- some costing $20,000 and more. In RAPID EMR,” he says, “we discovered the flexibility we were looking for at an extremely affordable price.”

Dispensing with paper documents
The chiropractors carry their tablet computers with them to use during examinations, enabling them to streamline patient visits and make notes and complete reports automatically. Tablet PCs replace the typical procedures in which notes from exams and office visits are hand-written on preprinted daily note forms. Using RAPID, doctors and staff now automatically record their information in electronic format which allows the information to be transferred automatically to a sophisticated context-oriented patient database from which reports are produced.

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