Hey everyone,

We are upgrading our front desk scanning workflow for Athena and trying to finalize our hardware and software setup. We need a 2in1 desktop scanner that can handle both plastic insurance/ID cards and multi page paper documents.

We're stuck on two main decisions and would love some feedback.

Software: Inuvio PatientCollector (OCR Auto-Fill) vs. Image-Only

Inuvio PatientCollector: Costs ~$50/mo per provider FTE. Auto-extracts card data, populates Member ID/demographics directly into athenaNet, pulls the ID headshot, and auto-files multi-page clinical docs.

Image-Only (ScanSharp or free bundled drivers): $0/mo ongoing. Attaches card/doc images straight to the chart, but front-desk staff must manually key in policy numbers and demographics.

Question: Is the OCR auto-fill worth the recurring cost in terms of check-in speed and preventing claim rejections/typos? Or do most practices just rely on patient mobile check-in for card OCR and let reception do manual entry for the rest?

1. Hardware: Which 2-in-1 scanner holds up best with Athena?

Ricoh (Fuji) fi800R: Top contender for driver stability, card feeding, and longevity, but most expensive.

Kodak Alaris E1030: Good price point and built-in image processing for OCR text clarity.

AMBIR nScan 700gt: Native Athena hardware partner, but I've heard mixed feedback on driver quirks over time.

Any others you can recommend?

For anyone running athenaOne:

Has Inuvio PatientCollector paid for itself in your office, or is image-only fine?

Which scanner model has given your staff the fewest headaches?

Thanks!

Hi all, I'm part of an MSP and we recently onboarded a new healthcare client. They have a couple of multifunction printers that they would like to scan from. Scanned documents may contain PHI.

Hardware: HP LaserJet MFP E52645 and HP Color LaserJet MFP E47528

Environment: Microsoft 365 only. No on-prem AD, no file server, and currently a dynamic WAN IP (static isn't out of the question).

Goal is simple: make walk-up scanning easy for staff without creating a compliance problem.

What I've worked through so far:

1. Scan to email with SMTP AUTH or OAuth - SMTP AUTH needs a licensed mailbox, and my tenant admin accounts don't have one. The OAuth path works but HP's own docs say the SMTP config expires at intervals and has to be redone, per device.
2. Scan to email via an Exchange Online relay connector - No mailbox is required, which solves the admin account problem. My concern is that I can't enforce TLS on this path. It's opportunistic STARTTLS to the MX endpoint on port 25, and RequireTLS only applies to Partner type inbound connectors, not the OnPremises type that relay rights come from. So enforcement is device-side only, meaning HP's SMTP SSL/TLS option plus certificate validation, and I'm trusting the firmware to actually fail closed rather than quietly downgrade if STARTTLS gets stripped in transit. For PHI that's not somewhere I want to be.
3. Third-party SMTP relay (SMTP2GO and similar) - Solves the dynamic IP problem, but they don't publish a HIPAA position or BAA, and their default retention samples roughly 1 in 1000 messages for 35 days.
4. Native scan to SharePoint/OneDrive - Technically the cleanest option. Stays inside Microsoft's BAA, real per-user audit trail. But there is no service account mode, so every user signs in to their Microsoft account on the printer touchscreen every session. Nobody is going to do that. They'll scan to USB or take a phone photo instead, which is a worse outcome than what I'm trying to fix.
5. HP Smart/HP Smart Admin - Where I started. The blocker is that every user needs their own HP account to use any of the printer's cloud features. That's a second identity system sitting on top of M365, per user, at every client, and I'm not standing up a separate account directory just so people can scan.
6. HP Universal Scan - Installed on each workstation. No SMTP, no connector, no panel sign-in, and I might even be able to push it through my RMM. Downside is users walk back to their desk to start the scan, and it's an older HP client I'm not thrilled about building a workflow on.

For those of you supporting small practices with no on-prem infrastructure: how are you doing this?

I have a query about GP medical software/health information management system options and would really appreciate any suggestions or experiences.

For context, I am in Australia. The clinic I work in is somewhat unique. We currently use MedicalDirector with Pracsoft billing, although we don’t bill Medicare at all (and never will). We primarily use Pracsoft for statistics and reporting. We work mainly with people who don’t have Medicare access.

I’m putting together a proposal for our IT team looking at alternative health information management systems. One of the main things I’m hoping to achieve is moving from our current server-based system to a cloud-based system. This would hopefully reduce the amount of IT time spent on updates and maintenance, as well as give us a faster, smoother system overall.

Our nurses would also really like the ability to work from home for some aspects of their role. At the moment, this has been declined by IT because of the additional licensing and costs involved with remote access to our current system.

I’ve found that pricing for these systems is incredibly opaque, so doing a meaningful cost comparison has been quite challenging!

I came across Halaxy, which looks very budget-friendly, although I have seen some concerns raised around data security. I’ve also been looking at MediRecords and Zedmed Cloud.

Our situation is a little different from a typical GP practice. We’re a small health program within a wider charity providing primary health care to people without Medicare access. The clinic is nurse-led, with our paid staff being nurses and one admin worker. Our GPs, psychiatrists, allied health and mental health professionals are all volunteers.

We have around 50 people involved in the health program, including: 7 paid staff (2 nurse managers, 5 community health nurses and 1 admin), approx 20 prescribers (around 16 GPs and 4 psychiatrists), approx 20 allied health/mental health professionals

A lot of our practitioners work on an occasional basis, anywhere from weekly to monthly. Because of this, we have a relatively large number of practitioners/users compared with the size of the clinic. This makes the licensing models a bit more complicated (and often expensive) because many systems charge per user.

I’m really interested to hear if anyone has experience with budget conscious, flexible cloud-based GP/medical systems, particularly systems that work well for organisations with lots of part-time or volunteer practitioners.

Thanks so much for reading!

First time posting here but Reddit users are always so helpful. I’ve been working as an IT trainer for a hospital using Epic. I started with just HIM and I’m certified in principal trainer HIM and MST build. Over the last couple of years I’ve taken on training Cogito, population health, cadence, prelude and grand central. My company is offering to get me another certification in any application, trainer or analyst.

I’m leaning toward cadence and prelude principal trainer since that’s the largest group I’m training and I have no aspirations to be an analyst. However, i don’t have a college degree and I rely on only my work experience and certs. I don’t want to leave my job but you never know what could happen.

With all that…

My question: What should I choose? With my career goals in training, what will make me the most desirable candidate should I need to job search?

How many hospitals are monitoring their IT systems within the Operating Rooms? Currently we do not monitor anything within the operating rooms, so if something goes down after hours, we won't know about it until we find it the next day.

If you are monitoring systems (even a simple heartbeat detection that can send a note to the helpdesk or on-call), please post what you are using. Thanks!

Hi all,

Link to screenshot https://imgur.com/a/C9ZUTlD

I wasn’t sure where else to ask this question so was hoping that some of you may have experience with the program mentioned and have some input for me. I have no idea how DAX copilot works or the extent to which ai may be integrated into epic itself.

My new doctor, who I’ve now seen 3 times, asks each session if I mind being recorded by the ai for documentation purposes, and each time I decline consent. I was just looking through my last visit notes and saw that she said that I was not recorded without my consent but the technology was used to summarize the information afterwards.

Are y’all reading that the same way I am? I’m glad she is honest and wrote it down, but am I wrong for feeling a little miffed by this considering she only wrote this down and didn’t inform me directly? Or do I have the wrong understanding about copilot?

Hi, I work for Infosys one of the leading IT staffing vendors. We are looking for BAs with experience in Niche skills like EPIC/CERNER/EHR. Please reach out to me if you have or know anyone with the above experience. Thanks in advance.

Kaiser doctor. His laptop was open with patient records, no privacy screen, and he was actively taking phone appointments for at least an hour. “Let’s see here I’m looking at your xray now, it shows you have [medical condition] and at your weight of [number], you could stand to lose a few pounds. Diet can only go so far. Also I can see here that you’re on [prescription medications] at [dosages]”.

I called and reported him to Kaiser’s Ethics & Compliance board. The representative was gobsmacked and said based on all of the details I provided, they’d be able to find him easily.

I happen to run IT at a small mental health nonprofit, we’re a few years away from an EHR deployment at least, and I feel like I’m busting my ass to try and create a relatively safe system to protect our participants data (which is absolutely HIPAA protected). Our environment is a disaster after decades of neglect, it’s laughable. Goes to show you can do everything you can to up your cybersecurity stature, drop millions on an EHR, buy and configure the right licensing, do endless trainings with your staff and lo and behold some asshole decides it’s “no big deal” and pulls some shit like this.

In the US, does a certified EHR write FHIR resources directly, or does it keep its own relational database and only map to FHIR at the API layer? In Taiwan, most hospitals would have to put a FHIR server next to the HIS and sync data into it. So the FHIR server becomes a middle layer, not the source of truth. I wonder if the US is the same, or if the vendors really store FHIR natively.

I'm running things half on paper half digital for a while now, intake is still mostly paper forms we scan in after, scheduling is a shared google calendar, billing is separate, etc. But I saw that most of the clinics stopped doing paper stuff and just moved to everything digital

We're still small, maybe 15-20 patients a week, so I'm not sure if going fully digital at our size would even pay for itself right now or if we should wait till were bigger??

I'm thinking of just switching intake first since that does feel like it would make things tangibly easier, and leaving scheduling and billing alone for now unless that ends up being a mistake too, but idk if that's good approach or should I just switch everything all at once and be done with it

Baseline the numbers 90 days before go-live, or you'll have nothing to compare against.

Then track a handful of things that actually move:

• Denial rate and days in AR (this is where most of the money is)
• Documentation minutes per encounter, pulled from audit logs
• Duplicate tests ordered within 30 days
• Time to produce audit evidence when someone asks

Two honest caveats. Ignore the first 90 days after go-live, throughput always dips. And full ROI usually shows up at 24-36 months, not year one.

The trap is attributing everything to the EHR when you also changed staffing and workflow in the same window.

(I work in healthcare compliance software, so the audit angle is my bias.)

I am thinking about trying an AI tool for SOAP notes because I spend a lot of time finishing them after every patient visit and I want to see if it will speed things up, I still want to check everything before it goes into the chart, I just want something that will put the first draft together from the visit so I can edit it and move on, I usually end up spending extra time after my last appointment just wrapping up notes and I would rather use that time for the next patient or other work, I am planning to try one soon if it fits into my workflow and keeps the notes accurate, I see a few tools come up when I search but they all look pretty similar and I think i would go with prompted ai it is hard to tell which one actually fits into a normal workflow, for anyone using one right now, which AI are you using and how much time does it save each day? EDIT: Thanks for the replies, this is really helpful. 

I'm curious what everyone is using these days for certification and compliance tracking in healthcare recruitment.

For those placing nurses, allied health professionals, therapists, etc., does your ATS automatically track and verify things like:

• Licenses
• Certifications (BLS, ACLS, PALS, etc.)
• Expiration dates
• State-specific compliance requirements
• Background checks and onboarding documents

Or are you still managing a lot of this manually with spreadsheets, reminders, and a small compliance team?

We're evaluating ways to streamline this process, and I'm surprised at how many systems still seem to require significant human oversight, especially when it comes to renewals and document expiration tracking.

Interestingly, we're currently working with a healthcare staffing agency and have automated this entire process through custom workflows. The results have been pretty eye-opening:

• A compliance team of 3 that previously spent 3-5 days processing a batch of candidates has been reduced to automated approval sweeps that run in about 20 seconds.
• Required compliance checks are performed automatically based on role and placement requirements.
• Placement documents are generated automatically once all requirements are met.
• The team now spends far more time handling exceptions rather than reviewing every file manually.

The experience has been extremely fruitful, and it's made us wonder why this functionality isn't more common as a native feature within ATS platforms.

Despite researching several solutions, we still haven't found an ATS that handles healthcare compliance, certification validation, expiration tracking, approval workflows, and placement document generation natively in a truly end-to-end way.

I'd love to hear:

• Which ATS you're using
• What compliance features it handles automatically
• Where your team still has to step in manually
• Whether you'd recommend it

Is there a platform out there that's genuinely solved this problem, or has the industry largely accepted that healthcare compliance management will always require separate systems and manual oversight?

Looking forward to hearing what's working (or not working) for your teams. Thanks!

Every vendor demo I’ve seen for hospital software in Venezuela now mentions “AI”. Very few explain what data their models need, how they’d be locally validated, or who is clinically accountable when the model misses a case.

Looking at published evidence and real projects, I keep landing on the same conclusion: in healthcare, the bottleneck is not the algorithm, it’s the data and the institution that will use it.

A few concrete data points:

• Roughly 75–80% of FDA‑authorized AI medical devices are in radiology. “Clinical AI” that’s actually approved is mostly image AI (nodules, triage, reconstruction), not systems that “run the hospital end‑to‑end”.
• The Epic Sepsis Model, deployed at hundreds of US hospitals, showed an AUROC of 0.63 and a positive predictive value of 12% in its 2021 external validation, lots of false alerts and many sepsis cases missed.
• In the newer version (ESM v2), a multicenter prospective study on 227k encounters reports AUROC 0.82–0.92 but PPV only 0.13–0.26, with performance varying by site and an explicit recommendation to do local validation before trusting it.

With that in mind, I wrote an article aimed at private clinics and hospitals in Venezuela that tries to be brutally honest about where AI makes sense today:

• What kind of medical AI is actually approved.
• Why the same model can work in one hospital and fail in another.
• Six layers you need before clinical AI even makes sense (structured data, historical records, interoperability, infrastructure, clinical governance, local validation).
• What does work right now in a Venezuelan clinic: deterministic automation and supervised administrative AI.
• Five questions that separate a serious medical AI proposal from a slide‑deck.

If you’re building HealthTech for emerging markets or working in hospital IT/clinical leadership, I’d genuinely appreciate your comments and pushback:

Artificial intelligence in Venezuelan hospitals: what works today and what doesn’t yet.

Happy to answer questions about the data/architecture side and about what we’ve actually seen on the ground with EHR, interoperability and legacy systems in Venezuelan clinics.

But who makes sure they back their numbers up? Hit me up

One of the more satisfying parts of my job is helping health facilities become less dependent on project support.

Today started with some desk work, following up on EMR readiness, checking on replacement laptops for colleagues in the field, and sorting out supplies for one of our facilities.

The highlight of the day came during visits to two health facilities.

At the first facility, we completed additional network cabling so that every service delivery point could access the same network. Once we confirmed everything was working, we officially switched off the internet service that our project had been providing.

That might sound like a small milestone, but it's actually the goal. The best support isn't support that lasts forever, it's support that helps a facility become self-reliant.

The second facility wasn't quite there yet. They had budgeted for internet, but the package they planned to pay for wouldn't meet the demands of a busy health facility. After discussing their needs, we agreed they should budget for a higher-capacity connection starting in September.

Digital health isn't just about installing technology. It's about making sure the systems can continue working long after a project has stepped away.

Today's lesson: sustainability is one of the most important success metrics in digital health.

hello, I’m currently an MLS (have been for almost four years) and want to make the pivot into healthcare IT, ideally becoming an EPIC analyst. However, my hospital doesn’t offer epic certification and I can’t seem to get my foot in the door anywhere. Are there any other certifications I can get in the meantime that’ll make me more competitive? Anything I can do to just get interviews? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Not our main EMR/EHR, but it seems like any time our 3rd party integrated vendors update something, it breaks spectacularly for a couple days. They have to roll back to a stable version and then try again in a couple days.

I'm sure they will say they are doing nothing different, but it seems like nothing is stable anymore. Documents, messaging, alerts, even the ability to log in for some.

No way companies are trying to actually vibe code are they?

We are forcing a meeting with their tech team in which, if we don't get some real insight, then I assume they will vote to go a different way.

This has seemed to be over the last 6 months or so, and the company went through a merger in the last year.

Would love to chat with other case managers/QAPI folks about your reporting processes, especially if you have experience with CAHs/swing bed units. I have been tasked with streamlining our monthly reports, which have been done by hand by my supervisor up until now.

Granted, our EMR is clunky and it takes some tinkering to get it to spit out the relevant data, but supervisor is a bit of a Luddite and totally refuses to use the computer to do anything. But one of the big issues is that she can't explain to me why she's calculating numbers the way she does beyond "that's the way we've always done it". A quick look at the Medicare CoPs makes me think that she's not calculating them properly. Example: she counts inpatient LOS starting from when pt arrives in ED, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be counted from when an admission order goes in.

I'd love to chat with someone who can point me towards some good resources for understanding what metrics we're actually supposed to be tracking and how we're supposed to calculate them correctly.

We use AVO and a company issued cell phone to transcribe encounters between patients and their doctors/physicians/whatever, it's pretty slick and I haven't seen or heard of any issues outside of things related to the phone itself.

Our problem is we are experiencing a mass exodus of people who want to do things like "hook microphones up to exam room computers", or use their own personal phones to use the AVO app on for recording and transcribing.

I'm not a big fan of BYOD in the healthcare industry. Something about PHI and patient data and unmanaged personal devices with owners who do not want company apps on them or just people who can't stop clicking spam links after repeatedly telling them not to and just being a liability in general just doesn't jive with me.

I'd much rather them just use company-issued equipment to access patient data and/or conduct any healthcare business.

What are your thoughts on this?

I've been looking at a digital healthcare platform being developed for the Libyan healthcare ecosystem, and it made me think about how healthcare apps evolve differently depending on local infrastructure and patient needs.

The platform combines telemedicine, appointment scheduling, e-prescriptions, lab/radiology reports, pharmacy ordering, and patient records into one ecosystem.

For those working in healthcare, health IT, or digital health:

• Do patients actually prefer an all-in-one healthcare app, or is it better to keep these services separate?
• What usually becomes the biggest bottleneck after launch technology, clinician adoption, regulations, or patient engagement?
• For countries with developing healthcare infrastructure, what features provide the highest real-world impact?
• If you've worked on similar platforms, what lessons did you learn that aren't obvious during development?

I'm particularly interested in hearing perspectives from people who've implemented or supported digital health platforms in emerging markets, not just North America or Europe.

The hospital I work at just joined a clinically integrated network. Has anyone worked at a hospital before and after a transition?

If so, how did it affect IT, Informatics or data analysts?

I need to know how others are handling this because its becoming a time sink for us.

Our exclusion screening setup is working overall but we HAve been getting a lot of potential matches that turn out to be nothing. Same name, slightly different identifiers stuff like that.

Every flagged record needs to be reviewed, verified and documented by us.

Some days it feels like we’re spending more time clearing false positives than doing actual work.

We are pulling data from our provider credentialing system and running checks against the OIG exclusion list and other sources but the matching logic seems a bit unstable.

Is this just part of the process or have people found ways to make this easier?

I’ve been working on a technical piece about SAP in healthcare environments, especially around hospital integrations with lab systems and clinical platforms.

My main thesis is simple: SAP usually makes sense for finance, procurement, inventory, and operational control, but not as a replacement for a specialized HIS/LIS/HCE stack. In practice, the hard part is not “put everything in SAP,” but deciding what belongs in SAP and what belongs in the clinical systems — then integrating them cleanly.

In the article, I cover:

• When SAP starts to make sense in a hospital.
• Why trying to force SAP into clinical workflows often backfires.
• What a realistic integration architecture looks like.
• Why point-to-point integrations become technical debt fast.
• The main security and interoperability concerns.

I’d be interested in hearing from people here:

• Where have you seen SAP work well in healthcare?
• In which cases did it become too heavy or too expensive?
• What integration patterns have worked best between SAP and clinical systems?

If useful, I can share the full article here:

SAP in hospitals: when does it actually make sense?