Married to EMR Software 9.3.08

Couple delivers unique Mental Health Software with electronic hand-writing

CHICAGO—Ayelle Dayan Schudy used to dread the monthly ritual.

Like many mental health professionals, Ayelle, a practicing psychiatrist in Chicago, used to sit down ceremoniously at home to hammer together her practice’s billing: to stitch numbers from spread sheets to names on calendars and match-up papers laid out across her dining room table with insurance codes.

Billing reconciliation was not a happy time for this solo practitioner of 150 clients and mother of four young daughters.

“It was just a nightmare,” she said. “And trying to get the kids to sit still while we were doing this wasn’t exactly easy.”

But luckily, Ayelle had in 1993 walked down the aisle with Eric Schudy, a mathematics major and software designer who had been engineering trading software for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

And to him, she turned.

But even this computer wiz couldn’t stomach the jumbled numbers, papers and patients. With his love of numbers, Eric estimated that they both wasted four to five hours each every month managing her back-office. That’s more than a work week.

“We could have been taking the kids someplace. We could have been vacationing,” he said. “Or if not that, Ayelle could have been seeing more patients.”

So Eric who had formed his own financial software company in 2004, Chicago-based Asmakta, Ltd., decided to design a system for mental health professionals that eased the back-office management by organizing billing, insurance coding, prescriptions, printing and quarterly reports.

Four years later—this Spring to be exact—, the two rolled out Therapy Office, a complete practice-management program on a single laptop.

Ayelle, a self-admitted techno-phobe, wanted things kept simple. She wrote her session notes on a pen and notepad. That’s how she was trained. That’s how she’d always done it.

“I didn’t want to have to learn to think the way an EMR works. I wanted an EMR to work the way I already think,” said Ayelle who did her residency at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Here is where she got lucky again.

Since 1989, Eric had been working with writable laptops—known as Tablet PCs—which allows users to hand-write directly onto the laptop screen with an electronic pen. He designed a groundbreaking program in 1990 for traders at the Chicago Merc that allowed them to write their trade-tickets electronically onto a laptop screen with an electronic pen.

So with Eric’s knowledge of writable laptops and her need for pen-writing, the two hammered out a notepad template that allows the therapist to write on the laptop screen with an electronic pen. Eric tailored the system to save immediately whatever notes are made onto the screen. These are then filed by date and can be retrieved by tapping on the specific session date.

But collaboration meant more than slapping a notepad template onto a laptop.

Half-a-dozen other management duties still lurked:

· Coding
· Appointment Scheduling
· Quarterly and annual reports
· Prescription Writing
· Security

“One of the things I pushed for was simplicity,” said Ayelle. “I didn’t want to get lost in different pathways and wind up in someplace I didn’t want to go.”

Getting the system she wanted took four years of constant discussion with her husband at all times of the day.

Ayelle said that their conversations about any common topic would always seem to dovetail into the topic of Therapy Office design. She remembered the time the two went out for a nice quiet evening at a little Chicago bistro. What started out as quiet time alone careened into a deposition with their waitress about the difficulties she had training on the bistro’s computer system.

Morning, noon and night, the two often discussed how to improve Therapy Office.

“It was like having a super-focus group that I had access to all the time,” said Eric. “Because we’re so close, I can translate that into technology changes very quickly,” said Eric. “It’s been the best feedback because I know her so well.