Centricity Practice Solution offers combined Electronic Medical Record and and Practice Management applications with a common look and feel that reflects a streamlined, user-friendly GE design and uses common terminology.

As one integrated product, Centricity Practice Solution now meets all of your practice’s
financial and clinical information needs, using the same SQL database for both EMR/PM and a common user interface. This release consolidates overlapping functionality and streamlines the flow of shared patient information between your practice’s financial and clinical workflows.

With single sign-on (or SSO) a licensed user can log on once and access multiple modules with a single password. SSO authenticates user information set up in Active Directory. Once logged on, the user can access both a patient’s financial or clinical information.

With the Centricity Practice Solution release, all application setup options have been consolidated into one easy-to-use module. Redundant functionality has been eliminated so that you only set up things once for integrated EMR and PM features such as patient registration, scheduling, and insurance company and plan information.

When you register a patient in Centricity Practice Solution, you will now be able to enter and access the following patient information:

• Contacts, both personal and professional, such as pharmacies and employers
• Insurance information, including guarantor information
• Demographics, including race
• Financial information, including Payment Plan (PM only)
• Existing appointments

Scheduling appointments in the Centricity Practice Solution application is based on previous PM application functionality. However, for PM/EMR users, with integrated scheduling functionality you no longer need a software interface to handle the following scenarios:

• Canceling appointments or marking them as no-shows
• Arriving a patient and alerting the nurse or medical assistant
• Associating the documentation with the appointment so that paperwork isn’t lost and appointments are associated with orders
• Requesting a follow-up appointment for orders, triggering a flag.

Collections now allows letters and correspondence notes for multiple tickets to be updated simultaneously for a single guarantor. You can print one collection letter that has the total overdue balance for a guarantor instead of one letter per visit. You can also select the visits to work with.

You can easily create and review correspondence notes and update contact dates. Collection status is also updated automatically. And when a collection balance reaches zero, the payment plan is automatically inactivated.

Previous to this release, entering and signing an order in the EMR application triggered the
HL7 interface to send the billing data to the PM application. The HL7 messages sat on the file server until PM staff billed for the patient visits. And, if PM did not recognize the EMR procedure code, the import failed, causing error messages. and potentially incomplete billing. In this release, orders billing information flows seamlessly to your financial
department preventing lost charges.

To support the secure concurrent user licensing model, this release stores all user and resource information in Microsoft Windows® 2000 Active Directory, which manages permissions for logon to a computer or network. Active Directory validates user information, such as passwords, against the Active Directory information rather than requiring the user to store network and database passwords. In addition, users can log on and off of the application with multiple user identities without having to log on and off of the current workstation.

With this release, you must set up user information in Active Directory before users can log on to this application. Refer to Microsoft documentation for detailed instructions on setting up users in Active Directory. However, if you are an upgrading Centricity customer, your users are automatically migrated to and set up in Active Directory with all their current privileges.

Combining the financial (PM) and clinical (EMR) functionality eliminates the need for software interfaces between EMR and PM applications. In Centricity Practice Solution, you'll only use LinkLogic in the EMR module to exchange clinical data with external systems such as labs and transcription services. You'll use MIK to exchange demographics and billing data with external systems such as insurance companies.

A flag is a brief message Chart users can send to other Chart users. You can view and manage your flags from the Chart Desktop. If yo have flags, the application displays flag icons at the bottom of the screen from anywhere in the application.

If you are set up as a Chart user, you can create and send flags from within the Chart module. PM users who are also set up as Chart users can double-click the flag icon to go directly to the Chart Desktop and view the flag.

For this release, all factory reports have been converted to Crystal Reports, v10.0. The application includes all Crystal Reports files needed to run the factory reports. Custom reports created in Crystal Reports v9.0 can be opened and saved in Crystal Reports v10.0. Some custom reports may need to be revised to reflect changes in the new integrated data schema. See Migrating to Centricity® Practice Solution for details.

This release adds new NPI (National Provider Identification) fields compliant with NPI documentation requirements mandated by CMS for 2007 and new CMS1500 and CMS1500 interim reports.