Further relational and mental health aspects

Medisoft: This program has been around for years and in use by the medical community at large. There are a variety of versions available, each doing more than the last and costing more as well. The top-of-the-line version keeps track of patient appointments, does superbills and electronic billing, can be modified to keep your herbal dispensary inventory, and can bill for multiple practitioners. People who use this software like it, but the price can be a bit steep: $200-1700 depending on how many bells and whistles you want.

EZClaim Medical Billing Software: If your practice is going to have a large component of insurance patients, you will eventually need to be able to do your billing online. That is the direction that the insurance industry is taking and will, eventually, be a requirement. This is only one company of many that make such software and the price is not cheap. Go to www.ezclaim.com for more information and a free 30-day trial if you need something like this now. If you don’t get to this point in your practice for a few years, the software may morph and the prices may come down somewhat as more competition arises. Alternatively, you can hire a company to do your online billing for you such as the Healthcare Billing

& Management Association (1-877-640-HBMA,

www.hbma.com). They will take a small percentage of each claim, but your billings are not likely to land in the

questionable file on an adjuster’s desk.

Acupuncture practice software: Very specific to our profession, there are a number of options available. Like Medisoft, these programs are able to do billing and keep track of herbal inventory. Unlike Medisoft, they typically have acupuncture specific items already loaded in the program. For instance, many of the programs not only offer billing and patient management tools but boast educational information on acupoints, herbs, and herbal formulas. Some programs also come with pre-loaded vendor information for herbs. Prices vary. Here is the contact information for the acupuncture-specific software available (in no particular order):

AcuBase: http://www.trigram.com/demo1.htm. Free 30-day trial. 1-888-4ACUBASE.

TCM Pro: http://www.tcmwindows.com/. Demo video available.

Q Chart 3.0: http://qpuncture.com/. Free downloadable trial version.

AcuPartner: www.acupartner.com. Free downloadable demo version.

Business Equipment

There are two types of business equipment that you are looking at here: generic and trade specific. All health service companies have a front desk and a computer but not all of them have needles and TDP lamps! This is a huge section. So, if you need to take a break before reading on, do it now!

1. Computer: If you haven’t noticed yet, we are no longer in the stone-age. You simply need to get one if you don’t have one already. Not having one doesn’t make you more

environmentally conscious; it makes you behind the times and, relatively, out of the loop.

With the hundreds of options available from Dell to Gateway, from Hewlett Packard to Toshiba, how is a person supposed to decide? We will tell you one thing and one thing only regarding computer selection, and the rest is up to you

—upgrade-ability. If the system you buy today is difficult or impossible to upgrade, then what we want you to do is this:

send a check for twice as much as what you are buying your system for today to us because, evidently, you have plenty of money and need to throw some away. In anywhere from 2-4 years, your system will be outdated and unable to run most of the software being developed. Think we’re kidding?

I [ES] bought a computer just three years ago. I got a great deal on the price, and the day I brought it home it was top-of -the-line. This year for my son’s birthday, I bought him some video game for the PC that he was absolutely in love with. I carefully wrapped it and signed it “with love, Dad.” Great gift that was! My top-of-the-line computer told me that its graphics card could not handle the game! “Okay, let’s go to the computer store to get a new graphics card.” Great idea, Dad! Unfortunately the computer I had purchased three years ago at such a great price was built with proprietary hardware.

This means that everything is attached to everything else. I couldn’t upgrade anything but the memory and the hard drive!

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The moral here is this: Stay away from companies that sell you tower computers in which everything is stuck together! If you cannot build a system yourself, find an IT savvy friend to do it for you or go to an actual computer store and have them build it. Prepackaging will get you a better price by a few hundred dollars, and, if that’s all you can afford, then get what you can. But, it is infinitely wiser to buy something that is indefinitely upgradeable than saving a few bucks on

something that is only bound for the dump in 30 months!

2. Printer: A printer and computer go hand-in-hand. By having a printer, you can quickly zap out superbills, HCFAs, and invitations to your open house. By having a high-quality one, the sky’s the limit. This is another area in which being too cheap will have you spending more money in repairs and ink with less quality and productivity.

Our recommendation is to get an all-in-one printer-copier-fax-scanner, and, if you can find one to make coffee, then get that too! When these machines first came out on the market, they were plagued with problems. Over the past few years, three things have happened: quality has gone up and price and size have gone down. Having the ability to copy a list of suggested stretching exercises for a patient on the spot is great. When you decide to start billing insurance for your patient so you can increase your patient base and income (see Section 3, Chapter 2), you have to photocopy their insurance card and keep it on file. How will you do this without a copier?

These days, sending a fax is a feature that almost every computer with a phone line can do. But what if what you want to send is not on the computer? If you had a scanner, you could import it or, if your printer was also a fax, you could skip that step and just send it.

Last, if you plan to do any in-house publication of brochures or other marketing tools, then having a scanner is a must.

Throw a picture of Hua Tuo on your herbal information page on your website or put a picture of your clinic on the flier that you are circulating around town.

For the price of an all-in-one, you get the ability to perform more than the rudimentary functions of a stand-alone printer. Even if you don’t see a need for a certain feature today, perhaps in six months you’ll get a creative bug, and then you’ll be happy you can do it all yourself.

3. Phone: We all want patients to call us, especially when they