Paul is potentially the most remote GP in New Zealand, and a beta tester for Profile for Mac.
He runs a sole practice in a very rural spot in the south island. The patient population is pretty normal, but in terms of geographical area served, he thinks it might be the largest. On top of being the only GP for kilometres, he also runs the ambulance. He runs 15-minute appointments, and the day I spoke to him he had seen 26 patients. The Internet quality is poor, so he does not depend on any Internet services.
He has experience with MedTech32, but he uses Profile for Mac - and loves it. Profile doesn't have the market share among NZ GPs, but Paul thinks it's easily superior. Profile provides a very similar feature set to MedTech. He uses it mostly for appointment management, patient records, task management, and invoicing.
He is such an incredible fan of Profile for one reason - the user interface. He found MedTech's user interface, and user experience "clunky", annoying, and a waste of time.
For example, one UX feature of profile he loved was the tagging system. Visitation notes can be tagged against certain patient problems. So when you view a patient with say, cardiovascular risk, you can click the problem, and it will show all visitation notes related to that problem. Profile also has impressive graphing features, and patient population analysis features.
He handles his own backups to his own hardware, and can restore a backup in 20 mins.
His only complaints about his software are that there is only one developer working on the Mac version, so updates are slow, and minor UI tweaks he'd like. I asked him if he had a magic wand, what would he change about his software, he said:
"I'd give every GP in New Zealand Profile for Mac."
The most interesting thing about Paul is that he is one of a couple of doctors that beta test Profile. He is sent pre-release builds of the software, and he helps them find bugs. They have an incredibly tight feedback loop - they'll send him a new version in the morning, he'll find six bugs by lunch time. They appear to be in contact every three days or so. Being a sole practice, it's much easier for him to test and try new tools.
He takes incredible pride in his tools, which includes his software, which he thought was unique among most GPs. Beyond helping test and influence the future of his software, he helps debug for other GP's he knows who are using profile. They'll send him emails, and he'll diagnose the issue, and send instructions to fix it in just a few hours.
I asked him his opinion on HealthOne, the shared care system which runs in the south island. He had his concerns that patients hadn't been properly notified of how their information was shared, and thought that it shouldn't be presumed that patients will want their data shared. However, he did say the utility of the system was great - getting the details was really good.
He noted that it is sometimes hard to make sense of another doctor/nurses notes.