Software Options for Doctor's Offices: A Review of Office Automation and Group Colloboration Tools

There are several software programs that are used in a doctor’s office. IDX, Stars, Meditech, and Eprescriber are just a few of the programs that are use daily. Some standard Office Automation that is used in a doctors office include but are not limited to: 

- Email using outlook express
- Microsoft Office for documents and letters 

Group Collaboration that is utilized by some offices include: 

- IDX 
- Stars
- Meditech 
- Eprescriber 

Every doctor’s office uses a different system of setting appointments, saving patient data and going about their day to day processes. As long as the system is tailored to that specifics office needs then any system can work anywhere.
IDX is the primary software utilized in the office that I manage. This web-based program is used to schedule appointments, register patients, create schedules, review patient insurance information and also to process billing. This program was recently updated; however, the end users were not brought into the process so the updates that were made were minimal and not very useful. Overall the system works well and functions at good speed. It is preferable to doing things the old way-scheduling appointments in a book that is passed around the office by the secretaries. When working for multiple doctors this can not only be very confusing but very messy as well. Since everything is logged into the patients account it is possible to view a patients previous appointment history which is very useful in determining future appointment needs. Each office has different needs and there is a very strong encouragement to use the automatic scheduling function that is built into the system, this is supposed to make things easier. It does not make things easier though it makes them much more difficult. Manually scheduling a patient allows you to view the schedule for the full day that you are attempting to book.