Burlington Walk-in Clinic

Burlington Walk-in Clinic consists of 28 part-time general practitioners and a staff of 7 that treat as many 60 patients per day. The practice’s philosophy is to provide “episodic care” for patients who can’t get in to see their regular family physician in a timely manner. Their intent is to treat patients’ immediate need until they are able to return to their family doctor. For patients who do not currently have a family physician, the clinic can provide additional services if necessary.

The Clinic started out using JSL’s MD4000 software to manage their administrative and clinical record keeping needs. However, they soon realized it wasn’t meeting their expectations for functionality, efficiency and cost effectiveness and as a result, decided in 2014 to look for alternative solutions. The clinic initially considered switching to the first vendor they met with but found many features were not suitable for their practice, the system was expensive, and the company would not accommodate requests for changes. As Martha Meenie, Office Manager says, “We were told we had to do it their way”.

What the clinic really needed was a solution that was easy to use regardless of each physician’s computer skill level and helped minimize the amount of time patients had to wait. The clinic physicians wanted to be able to easily navigate throughout the system but also have all the essential patient information to appear on one screen.

When the clinic staff came to the ABELMed headquarters in Burlington, Ontario, they were pleased to find the company was willing to make changes that best reflected the clinic’s workflows. Says Martha, “ABEL created an electronic template that replicated our paper patient chart – this made the changeover very easy. All the patient information, previous encounters, lab work, and x-rays are easily accessible which is necessary to maintain an efficient patient flow in our busy clinic.”

Once ABELMed was implemented at Burlington Walk-in Clinic, as an unexpected bonus, the doctors found that the software was easily adaptable to each of their specific needs. Staff found the billing extremely easy and appreciated the use of custom supercodes to increase efficiency and speed. For the management side of things, Martha really likes ABELMed’s reporting capability – in particular, production and patient reports that help her with staff resource planning.