It is formative and effective!

Have received some feedbacks from a few clinics that their usual hand-written receipts for the patients have been rejected, and patients were not happy about that. It is not professsional, who can't even produce a valid treatment receipt for a petient to claim their entitled benefits from the private health insurance, which they have paid a big bugs for.

To help their members and other Chinese Medicine Practitioners, Acupuncturiests and Remedial Massage Therapists understand the detail requirements and current industry events and developments, NSW Association of Chinese Medicine held a online seminar in the evening of 27th March 2021, from 6PM to 10PM, open to all the FCMA members via an online Zoom meeting. Total 300 people attended this 4 hours online seminar from the beginning to the end, and there were many others could not join the meeting due to the Zoom meeting attendence number limitations. A milestone that a FULL HOUSE seminar never happened ever before!

I was invited to be the speaker for the corresponding topic of <<Understanding and comply the latest “Ancillary Billing Standards” from MBP and AHM >>.

There are more Chinese herbal practitioners adopting to using Compound Chinese Herbal Granule nowadays rather than using the raw herbs. The advantage is obvious that avoiding the hassals to boil the herbal tea, and it is much easier for intake it too!

But, how are we going to prepare the label for it according to the <<Guidelines for safe practice of Chinese herbal medicine>> if it is prescribing 2 or more compounded herbal granules(meaning there are about 20 or more herbs included)???

The label size for a large herbal granule bottle is about 8~10cm Width x 6cm Height. It is very challenge to print the individual herb's name in Pinyin, along with the dosage amount, intake instructions, clinic name, address, contact phone number, practitioner's name, AHPRA Registration number and signature, the prescription date and dispensing date.

OMG! We need to print these required information at least in a A5 size paper (14.8cm Width x 21cm Height).

In visiting a few Chinese Medicine clinics around Sydney recently, surprisingly received the same request to be able to include multiple herbal prescriptions in one consultation record. What the practitioners like to do is that one prescription is used for the current treatment, and the second prescription is for health maintenance or improving afterward. This actually is quite common for the adult Chinese people with a certain degree of understanding health caring using Chinese herbs. We will make this function available in the very near future.

Whether you like it or not, face it or pretending not seeing it at all, majority of the Chinese Medicine Practitioners charged for a 30 minutes session of consultation was around $25 dollars, that price was never consider the cost for the much longer time to prepare a consultation record in English!

With the fast approaching of the effective date of 12th Nov. 2017 for the new "Guidelines for safe practice of Chinese herbal medicine", how far can we go using the old fashion of hand writing consultation records, treatment principles, treatment outcomes, including the herbal prescriptions in PinYin(required!), labels and the proper herbal preparing instructions, all are required to be written in English? Not to mention lots more of the other requirements such of itemised accounts/receipts etc.

Smart TCM has all the necessary functions to help Chinese Medicine Practitioners to overcome these hurdles.

There is a requirement to use English for labelling the prescribed herbal packs or granule compounded bottles in the Guidelines for safe practice of Chinese herbal medicine. We recently have received enquires from some practitioners asking how this could be done easily and professionally, like what the Chemistries done for dispensing Western Medicine. We are happy to announce that this labelling function has been developed with Smart TCM. We can print the prescribed herbs in the label, alone with the clinic details and herbal usage instructions.

More and more people like to have a copy of treatment receipt emailed to them, rather to have a print out hard copy to keep. We are glade to see that Smart TCM has the function to export the receipt in PDF format, together with the practitioner's signature on it.

This will help to save our environment resource.

In a recent presentation in NSWACM seminar, I've just realised many of our software users/practitioners not knowing that Smart TCM has the function to attach as many pictures or scanned medical reports as the user/practitioner wants to a treatment record.

I found that this function is very helpful to tracking the treatment process and result proving. For example, we could use our phone to take the tongue photos (without the client's face portion) and the skin photos if it is a skin problem. Of course, we need to have the permission from the client every time to do so, and show to the client those photos you took. Delete those photos from your phone after the treatment record is completed before you left the clinic.

Disclaimer: the above is for reference only, use on your own risks. We are not responsible for any problem caused.

The SMS reminders now can be scheduled to be sent out automatically for the next date appointments booked.

I used to have a lot of Chinese Medicine studying notes recorded during my medical college time and the clinical practice time, unfortunately they were lost sometime somewhere along the way. With the popular social media like WeChat, I now can read a lot of Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture related fantastic reference material everyday.

However, I found that there are so much that I like to collect or take a note, but it seems there is no any way to do it like what I used to do in medical college time. The information available is too much to be hand written down, too difficult and too time consuming to find it when I need it. For this reason, I now created a function in Smart TCM called "StudyingNote" to record them! The information recorded including "Topic", "Detail Information", "Key Words", "Source" and "Original Hyperlink". A searching function is implemented to search for the Topic and the Key Words fields in order to find the reference material fast.

I'm aware of this function is nothing to do with clinic record management. As a Chinese Medicine practitioner and Acupuncturist, I like it very much! I'm hoping you will find it useful too.

The Guidelines for safe practice of Chinese herbal medicine was released on 16/11/2015 by Australia Chinese Medicine Board(CMBA). This guideline will take formal effect in November 2017 by given 2 years of transition period.

As a Chinese Medicine Practitioner, are you ready to comply with the Chinese Medicine herbal prescription and labelling standard requirements set out in this document? Specifically and most importantly, are you able to write PinYin instead of Chinese Characters for all the Chinese Herbs prescribed? If you are not sure, then Smart TCM software can definitely help you out!

Smart TCM is ready to comply with all the requirements in this guideline!

With most Chinese Medicine Practitioners originating from mainland China, handwritten consultation records seem to be favoured over other forms - especially in relation to herbal prescriptions (I myself like this way too:-)). Such practitioners are thus predisposed to write their records by hand, as opposed to doing so digitally. This choice may be attributed to personally limited technological skill or old habit, but sooner or later is going to create problems for the storage of comprehensive consultation records and keeping requirements from CMBA and other private health funds.

With this being said, Smart TCM provides a solution to address this issue. With a suitable scanner* directly or indirectly connected to a computer, Smart TCM provides practitioners with the options to directly scan any hand writing on a piece of paper, store it in a proper location on your computer and link it to a consultation record. This will help the practitioners to a certain extent with managing their consultation records more efficiently.

*The scanner is not required to be an expensive one. I myself purchased a HP Deskjet 2540, AUD$50 with 2 years warranty included.

Smart TCM is not just a clinic record management software anymore. It is about Chinese Medicine knowledge referencing, learning, researching and personal skills improving plus patient relationship management.

After 5 years of real time practical usage by many Chinese Medicine practitioners Australia nationwide, used by the practitioners with computer skills from almost 0 to 10 score, Smart TCM software has been practical approved to be one of the top grade Chinese Medicine computer softwares at present.

The philosophy of Smart TCM software development is to be a really helpful and trusted assistant to a Chinese Medicine practitioner, to help to carry the enormous Chinese Medicine knowledge and personal practical experiences in the practitioner's preferred format that any human brain can not store, and can be easily referenced and used by the practitioner and his/her associates.