Bruce BassiWhy did you choose ChARM for your practice?
I’m Dr. Bassi, I’m an addiction psychiatrist and I’m based out of Chicago but I do exclusively virtual visits in my telepsychiatry practice. The practice name is TelepsychHealth and so I see patients in multiple states around the country in California Illinois Florida and Minnesota. I’ve been using charm now for about two years I have a staff of about six providers. I first looked into charm about two years ago, and in my process of researching charm I looked at about 20 different EHRs. The features that I like most about charm are it’s all encompassing nature and its simplicity use. My main priority was finding an EHR where I didn’t have to go and go separately into a billing service and go separately into a scheduling service and then use a different e-prescribe, and so this was all integrated in one system one webpage, simple easy to do. And for that matter, just one team that I would be interacting with too. Since I do a lot of telepsychiatry and it had an integrated telepsychiatry or telehealth platform that was also a huge plus for me.
The transparent pricing was also attractive because I was starting off my practice where was just me and I didn’t really know what my volume was, and so I didn’t really want to pay for one of the larger companies $300 a month when I didn’t really know what my volume was. Charm’s pricing was quite attractive, and I thought it was so usable.
How was the on-boarding process?
When I was evaluating various EHRs not only the number of features that they have is important, but just the usability in terms of like how intuitive are the features that you’re interacting with? Like are the things there that you would expect them to be there? And so I didn’t really need an onboarding process. I had a few questions that came up along the way but I just kind of got my feet wet and when I needed a question answered, I had reached out the charm support, which was really helpful. It was very intuitive and I think that’s one of the strengths of charm because nobody really wants to do an onboarding process, which that’s like you know eight hours long which is typical in the field for various EHRs. You can easily spend eight hours learning the EHR, but the usability goes a long way here.
Was it easy to train your staff to use ChARM?
It was fairly easy to train my staff to use charm, and they had a pretty similar experience as me. I had made some videos about pretty typical processes and using charm and then I would send them securely to my staff, and they would watch that process and then that’s pretty much all that was required for them to learn it it.
How easy is it to customize ChARM?
It was pretty easy to customize charm especially in terms of the navigation menus and the questionnaires where the patients initially reach out to our practice. Once the encounter starts, you can make sure there are all the things that you need in that encounter to type efficiently, with QuickText. I use the QuickText feature (dot phrases) quite a bit to reduce the amount of time typing something that you’d have probably typed in every appointment you could just do a QuickText pretty easily.
What features do you like the most about ChARM?
I used a number of charm add-ons. The feature that I use the most is the text messaging feature. I also use the telehealth feature obviously, as that’s a charm add-on. The text messaging reminders to the patients prior to the appointment are important because the rate of no-shows and cancellations can be quite high in the field, which in turn obviously reduces the revenue. If you need to pay, I think it’s a very nominal amount, for the text messaging feature too if that can potentially reduce a few no-shows that easily pay for itself.
We do take insurance, so the billing/ERA features are very nice because it basically covers the entire revenue cycle for the patient coming into the practice.
Do your patients use the patient health portal?
My experience using the patient health portal has been very positive I’d say probably close to 100 percent of my patients use the patient portal. It’s an easy, secure way to communicate with us and the rest of the staff in terms of just communicating and general questions and also requesting medication renewals refills. It’s very easy for us to communicate that way and the patients find it also very easy to use. Obviously it’s more secure than using email, because email is not secure, so any any private practice needs to have some sort of patient health portal, and one that’s easy to use goes a long way in improving patient satisfaction.
How is your experience with ChARM support?
My experience with charm support has been great. I got to know Venky, I got to know Rao, I got to know Samba. So I’m all on first-name basis with all of them and they know me very well and this is my first time actually meeting them in person at charmalot 2019 in Tucson. They look down at my my name
badge and they say Dr. Bassi! I know you so well! And that is by email basically, and telephone calls, and we actually did a couple of webinars together. And we have been working together very well. It’s been a great experience, I would definitely recommend it to other psychiatrists like myself who are starting off, or therapists or counselors or psychologists who are starting their practice who have a small number of staff because it helps to reduce that overhead and that burden for ancillary staff. It’s very efficient to schedule patients and to get patients booked. You don’t really need to have much ancillary staff, so for somebody who’s first starting out, charm is a very attractive option for them for that reason.
Would you recommend CHARMALOT to friends?
So CHARMALOT 2019, this is my first year at CHARMALOT. It’s been a great experience, I’m here at the Westin, it is beautiful in Tucson, the weather is also really nice in December and the presentations here I’ve been really simplistic and easy to follow. I think that the staff is all really supportive and friendly too and so it’s been really nice networking and conversing with other people in the field and getting to know one another. It’s a very tight-knit community and yeah I’ve just been enjoying it so far here definitely would recommend it for those who have probably first started off using charm like kind of on the newer side of things but even for an advanced user, I would say I’m fairly advanced user of charm, as I’ve been using charm now for two years, there were a number of features that I didn’t know about and the number of questions that I was able to ask those engineers and the staff here and so from that perspective. There’s always something that you can learn. Even if you think you know everything, there’s constantly new features that are being rolled out, and so making sure that you have those features incorporated into your practice to increase efficiency is definitely one big advantage to go to CHARMALOT.
