Best Computer for Doctors

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Your a medical professional. Your slammed with an influx of new patients and strict HIPAA guidelines. There’s a stack of patients’ charts and hours of dictation left to do. Now your medical group added new goals to meet by quarter end. How will you balance all it all? How can you adapt to a computerized medical field?

The answer is simple:

Get the right computer, learn the basics, and succeed.

The problem is finding the right computer. 

There once was a time that having someone who knew computers in your family was rare, now their as common as Marvel superhero movies. You end up listening to that 14 year old nephew of yours, and you buy buy that $2100 dollar Alienware laptop or that $1900 dollar MacBook Pro. Now you have no idea how it works and your IT department can’t get the programs you need to run on it.

Now your stuck with an expensive brick that will now be demoted to watching Netfilx and YouTube videos.  

Lets avoid the expensive mistake. Keep these two rules in mind:

Rule 1: You computer should be compatible with your medical group’s network.

This is simple to find out. If your medical group uses Microsoft Office, Exchange for your email server(you can ask your IT department), and the rest of the employee’s have Windows XP, 7 or 8 running on their desktops. Then you should use Windows as your main operating system.

Macs are nice, and yes, you can buy Office and Outlooks for a Mac. Macs are expensive though —which is nothing new— but the biggest issue is having them serviced. Your medical group’s IT department will have almost an endless supply of people who know how to fix windows. Which means if your computer breaks, someone will be able to trouble shoot it. If you have a Mac? Then Billy the I-still-have-a-holier-than-thou-IT-mentality network troll will be the only guy to help you. 

Trust me, most of the medical software out there is designed to run on Windows. You could access your medical groups’s programs on a Mac using a local virtual box, dual booting, or using VMWare or Citrix. The problem is now you’ll either have to configure virtual box yourself or be at the mercy of a wireless network. 

Rule 2: Go with a Solid State Hard Drive

I can go into major detail why solid state hard drives are 100x better than traditional hard drives; however, I believe this video will say enough (its 3 minutes long, but its worth the time)

I recently decided to buy a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO for my laptop. I installed Windows 7 Professional and decided to see this speed first hand. 15 seconds later, Windows was up and ready to go. 

Also, using a SSD will make applications load faster like Photoshop, EMR/EHR programs and radiology viewers. 

One of the reasons Macs are so much faster is because their hard drives are SSD not HDD. Now, an SSD will be more expensive than a traditional one, but benefits outweigh the cost.

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I love Macs, but they are not the best tools in an enterprise/medical environment. They fill a specific niche and that niche isn’t the medical field. If you are willing to drop $1400 MacBook, you could buy a HP EliteBook Revolve 810 which has the same specs and doubles as a tablet.

There you have it. Finally some clear advice for a busy professional. 

QuickBooks For Doctors

Doctors juggle multiple responsibilities, from being an advocate for their patients, a consoling family members,  to being a business owner. It is very easy to put off seemingly less important tasks like bookkeeping or use sub-par methods to track finances. 

This post will give an overview how a doctor or a small medical practice would use QuickBooks Pro 2013 to manage the finances and employees.

QuickBooks Premier professional services might sound like the right choice for your practice, and you may need it later down the road if you would like in-depth reports specifically geared toward businesses that offer professional services; however, many practices will do just fine using Pro for their financial software. 

Let me point out one many thing, do not use QuickBooks for insurance billing. Most doctors have specialized software that will handle the codes and the billing, it might sound odd having two programs that are able to track receivables, but QuickBooks just isn't the right solution for medical billing.

What you would use QuickBooks for is to record the deposit, checks that are written, manage payroll, and run financial reports at the end of the year for tax purposes. You could uses QuickBooks to track individuals who pay with cash for services (which might benefit the doctor office and the patient). 

If you have a small payroll, you could easily get started with Basic payroll for $20 per month and $2 per employee. The $2 fee cover direct deposit, so there is no need to write manual payroll checks. Basic payroll means you still have to pay and file your own taxes at the end of the year, but QuickBooks has plenty of reports that will help you.

If you decide to not go that route, I would suggest full service payroll. It cost $79 per month and $2 per employee. With his service you only need to enter the hours in QuickBooks. Intuit will handle calculating the taxes and paying the payroll taxes. All you need to do is make sure there is an account for them to withdraw the funds. If there are any problems with your filing, Intuit speaks on your behalf. If there are any penalties because of errors, Intuit pays them, not you.

There are numerous benefits using QuickBooks to manage your company's financial information and I hope this post shows some of the reasons why any medical office should use QuickBooks.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment!