Your practice toolkit isn’t complete without these.
Fam Pract Manag. 2006;13(8):14
Do you feel naked without your stethoscope? Anything that spends so much time hanging around your neck or coiled in your lab coat pocket – not to mention the time it spends in your ears – is bound to become part of you. It has come to be the archetypal tool for physicians – the symbol of all the tools you use, from reflex hammers to acid-base nomograms to ECG machines and on and on.
And that’s just the clinical side of your toolchest. For its entire existence, Family Practice Management has been collecting, cleaning up and sharpening tools to fill up the other side – the side you reach into when you are documenting a visit or coding a claim or assessing patient satisfaction or systematizing your care for patients with a chronic disease. This issue of FPM contains a special section that highlights a number of these tools and introduces a few more. In the print issue, you will find eight tools ready to copy and use:
Two new standardized admission orders;
The popular FPMlists of ICD-9 codes for family medicine – both short and long versions;
A visit summary form designed to help elderly patients assimilate all the information you give them in the course of a visit;
Two encounter forms intended to speed documentation and help implement the best available evidence;
A new model superbill based on an analysis of superbill forms submitted by a number of readers.
But we couldn’t get all the tools we wanted to into the print version, so you’ll find many more admission orders and encounter forms in the online version of the issue, as well as one tool we couldn’t print if we tried: a PDA version of the FPM Long List of ICD-9 codes. This new resource for your Palm or Pocket PC was developed by Robert M. Wolfe, MD, as a HandyShopper database. While developed as a shopping list manager, HandyShopper is such a powerful application that it powers any number of Palm OS applications, and it has the advantage of being available for Pocket PC as well. The new database puts all the codes you’re likely to need just seconds away. And, like all the tools in the FPM Toolbox, it’s free. Find it at https://www.aafp.org/fpm/icd9.html.