Sister site http://www.wikihost.org/w/practicefusionusers/start
drreflex
Glad to see that we have a place to exchange notes and ideas that is more functional than PF Answers.
I would like to introduce you to what I hope will become a sister site, the practicefusionusers wiki. This wiki is a knowledge base and template repository for Practice Fusion users. IT IS NOT A PRACTICE FUSION PRODUCT.
I envision the wiki as a user generated Practice Fusion (PF) user manual and Practice Fusion template repository. The wiki complements this user group. Both are meant to complement to the services and support provided by Practice Fusion.
There are a number of reasons why I felt we needed a Practice Fusion wiki. The most important is that PF is a template based EHR and despite this PF has very limited template resources with no true template repository and no viable means of sharing templates that does not require omnipotence and excessive expense.
In addition, templating under PF is inefficient and does not provide options for template backup, reuse, renaming, or copying. The template naming and formatting technique I have suggested in the PFUser wiki comes as close to fixing these issues as we are going to get until PF offers template import and export functions.
Please visit the PFUser wiki (http://www.wikihost.org/w/practicefusionusers/start) and consider becoming a contributing member.
I am looking for as many users who would be willing to contribute templates. If you are writing new template or copying an old template, it will usually save you time to extract old templates to WORD files and create new templates as WORD files (see wiki for simple algorithm). If you use my recommended naming and formatting, it will make reusing templates and entering templates into PF faster. The resulting files can be uploaded to the PFUsers wiki in only a few seconds. If become a contributing member, you will need to join wikihost (it is free) and go to this page (http://www.wikihost.org//w/practicefusionusers/become_a_contributing_member) for instructions.
I am also asking PF to provide us with the ability to export PF templates to formatted WORD documents and to import formatted WORD documents into PF templates as soon as possible. (See: http://www.wikihost.org//w/practicefusionusers/import_export for a discussion of why this is an urgent request.)
Please vote to have PF implement template export/import functions immediately. To do so. Log on to PF. Go to PF Answers. Search for “Can we have a template import export feature?” Enter a reply letting PF know if you feel this is a priority request.
Darwin R. Boor, MD
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I feel obligated to explain my negative comments about PF in part because I strongly support the product overall.
To share templates under PF you need to know:
1. Who are practice fusiton users.
(unavailable from PF).
2. Which of the practice fusion users might have the template you are looking for (ex. PF user specialists in your field).
(unavailable from PF),
3. Which of the practice fusion users who have the template you are looking for would be willing to share it with you
(unavailable from PF).
There are over 150,000 PF users so it is likely that a PF template similar to the one you are looking for exists.
In addition to requiring omnipotence, sharing templates under PF is expensive (especially for any user who is willing to share templates). Each time a PF user wished to share a template with another practice, the sharing PF user must enter a service request to PF. Here are the instructions:
Practice Fusion expert answer:
You can share your charting templates with another provider who has a separate Practice Fusion account.
To do this, please submit a request from your administrator email address to www.practicefusion.com/contactsupport.
This request must contain:
1. The exact name of the templates you wish to share.
2. Your username and the username of the user at the practice you want to share with.
3. The Practice IDs of both your practice and the practice you wish to share with.
Postedby PF Staff Dan
Clearly the cost to any practice willing to share their templates would be prohibitive under these requirements. The obvious solution is a template repository where templates are uploaded and downloaded independently without the intervention of PF staff. When PF declined to discuss providing this service in a timely manner (i.e. immediately) the PFUser wiki was born. All I needed was a free hosting site (i.e. wikihost).
There was a third issue that I have with PF templating in general. The process of generating templates is slow, has no provision for multi-line template entries, no provision for backing up our templates, and no provision for copying and renaming templates. My solution was to build my templates outside of PF and enter them using a more efficient technique than that recommended by PF. Those hints are included in the PFUsers wiki and serve as my recommended format for storing and entering PF templates. Please take a look at the site (http://www.wikihost.org/w/practicefusionusers/start)