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Like many physicians in the 1990s, Gregory Pecchia, D.O., found his office getting busier by the day. With more patients and more paperwork from managed care organizations, Independent Practice Associations (IPAs) and the state and federal governments, more time that ever was being spent pushing paper. This meant that there was less time to devote to actual patient care.
 | Dr. Pecchia was using e-mail for his personal business at home; therefore why not use it to communicate with patients as well? The e-mail concept had the promise of increasing and improving communications so he announced the service to his patients and invited them to try it. While the patients loved it and began to immediately take advantage of this new communication tool, it also created new problems for him and his staff. Since e-mail was handled outside of normal workflow and not connected to medical records. It required and enormous amount of coordination and diligence to keep track of the inbound and outbound communications, store those communications for the future, and create quick and efficient cross-references. It came to be that more time had been taken away rather than created due to the effort needed to effectively manage all e-mail communications. |
Shortly thereafter, Dr. Pecchia was introduced to Alteer Corporation. Alteer’s solution automated the entire infrastructure in Dr. Pecchia’s office – from scheduling to prescription renewals to creating paperless medical records and easy management / storage of all communications. This meant that everything needed to efficiently communicate with his patients via e-mail was right at his fingertips at all times, both in and out of the office. Dr. Pecchia currently has about 700 patients that communicate with him via e-mail. They routinely make requests for appointments, prescription refills,
and general information. The office staff is able to easily triage e-mail, send it to the appropriate staff person or the doctor himself, as well as easily store necessary copies in the patient’s electronic medical record, thus saving valuable time and money.
