Report from Kansas City

Tom and I have been here in KC at Cerner headquarters for the last few days at the Cerner Physician Community conference. As you might imagine, Prescription Writer has been a hot topic and a source of pain across Cerner's clientele. While I think we've had some improvements in function since we went live with it in March, it still requires considerable reworking until there is uniform satisfaction. A few lessons learned:

• the addition of sentences for the sig have helped to fill in required detail fields
• though promised to be an efficient transition, data from EasyScript should be ditched
• Consider delete all old favorites from EasyScript
• Rather than using Renew for refills of Rxs written on EasyScript, use Cancel/Reorder to reformat the Rx and allow Renew next time around
• Build new Favorites within the new Ambulatory Meds favorites folder and, if you have the patience to do so, build a specialty- or class-based subfolder structure within that larger folder
• DO NOT CHANGE your Home folder from the Durable Medical Equipment (DME) catalog to anything else. You risk losing this catalog if you move it.

Our pleadings for a return to an EasyScript user interface have been heard. While we can't expect to see a return to this anytime soon, I will be part of a working group with the Cerner engineers who are working on this important project. They demonstrated a mock-up of something similar to EasyScript and so I am hopeful.

That's it for now.