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PCC's design team has been known to do some of its best work outside the office.

It is often while watching clinicians and staff on the job, in their own milieu, that PCC designers glean the kind of information they need to do their job, which is design functions that make using PCC EHR easier.

Team members have made several trips to PCC EHR practices in the past year. Their goal with these planned visits is, simply, to watch how doctors, nurses and staff use the EHR as part of their daily routine. There is no planned agenda other than to observe.

Dr. Thomas Moseley recently received a belated Christmas present in the form of a $63,750 ARRA check, and the timing was none too soon for his small practice in rural, northern Vermont.

Newport Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a long-time client of PCC, and its three clinicians received its Stage I EHR incentive funding just before Jan. 1. The much-needed cash infusion, says Dr. Moseley, will go toward offsetting the direct and indirect costs associated with transitioning to PCC EHR.

The free RBRVS calculator has been updated for the 2012 Revised CPT data, which includes a return of the 1.000 GPCI floor, some updated codes, and an increase to the new CF. 

You can see it all here.

At our Users' Conference last summer, Brandon Betancourt gave a presentation entitled, "Practice Makeover: 101 Ways to Transform Your Practice."  I was teaching at the same time, so I couldn't attend, but I did hear the applause at the finish.

Eric Schluntz used to have old school opinions on the use of new technology in his classroom. In fact, the Hartford Memorial Middle School science teacher was still mourning the loss of chalk and rueing the classroom's new interactive white board gizmo in 2009 when Geoff Gevalt, director of Vermont's Young Writers Project, asked if he and his students would test-drive YWP's new digital classroom.

Two years later, Schluntz says YWP's online classroom environment, in which students learn through writing and reading and critiquing each other's assignments, has transformed his approach to teaching and allowed students to take more pride and ownership in their work. “Because we're publishing our classwork online, kids who don't normally share in class are much more willing to put themselves out there and offer very honest and creative thoughts about writing and science,” says Schluntz.