CHARTSandNOTES produces pages for paper charts.
Nevertheless, it is a powerful electronic health record as well. It can also be used for temporary record creation and storage, when offline and/or away from a central commercial EHR.
Advantages:
- Independent: CHARTSandNOTES resides entirely on your computer. You are completely off the grid, not dependent on any internet connection or telephone line, and with no need for technical assistance.
- Gradual startup: Start any time, one patient at a time, without any modification of your existing chart system.
- Intuitive: Data entry flows as in a paper chart, with free text as well as one-click shortcuts.
- Inexpensive: The software is free, so the only equipment needed is a laptop or desktop computer with a mouse and a simple black-and-white printer.
- Flexible: Allows for charting standard office visits, hospital visits, phone advice, and clinical-study visits.
- Powerful: The electronic database can be searched and reported many ways, to better inform you about your practice.
- Efficient: Allows instant printout of prescriptions, test requisitions, consultation letters, and weight & BP graphs to hand to the patient.
- Easy to quit: If someday you must move to a group’s commercial EHR, nothing is lost: your move to that EHR will proceed as if you had never had one before.
- Open-Source: CHARTSandNOTES is running on standard Microsoft Access software. Subject to the provisions of the General Public License, anyone can modify or adapt it as desired, and users can freely share all such advice.
- Also For Transient Use: Mobile physicians can use CHARTSandNOTES to record chart data while offline anywhere, then have a scribe translate it into the group’s commercial EHR once back at home base.
Limitations:
- CHARTSandNOTES is designed and intended for solo practitioners or very small groups (although large groups may still find it useful for their mobile users — see “Transient Use”, #10 above).
- Although it provides diagnostic and service codes, it does not include any provision for billing or financial recording.
- If you are already using an EHR, you must return to reliance on paper charts as your principal and legal records; and data from other EHR’s will not be electronically transferable to CHARTSandNOTES.
- CHARTSandNOTES has not been constructed to interact with any other electronic systems you may use for prescriptions, test reporting, etc.
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