I use Aria
Posted By: LadyTamara on 2009-06-10
In Reply to: Aria Platform - anyone use this piece of junk? - GotTheTShirt
One of the things I dont like about it is that for any suggestions you have to contact Varian and they will consider them in their next upgrade. Aria in general is not user friendly at all. Our IT tech has made many templates within the document system and we have to rely on the IT tech to edit anything not working properly and it takes our IT tech forever to make changes. It does not import information well (constant editing) at all and is painfully slow. I think IMPAC has a much better program where the Transcriptionist has more control over the program and is not at the mercy of an IT tech/data administrator. The data import feature was suppose to cut down on transcription time and it has if anything tripled it with the info import compared to straight typing. We do A LOT of cut and paste. When you do that in the new version, I think it's 8.1, then it locks up so you cant use your formating tool bars, the way around that is to save your doc, exit the program & then go back in to it to modify it and then the toolbars come back on. I can still use autocorrects & macros with the program though, although the Word program within Aria is just a shadow of your main Word program, so any "creation" of macros etc have to be made in the version of Word on your computer and not within Aria. I hate having to individually select pts and open the chart and wait for pages to load and auto fill, even the pts name/date slows down the system... my biggest gripe is also about the task pad - evidently that was a creation by the same jerk who invented taxes, that is a whole other issue so I wont even get into that...I would give my eye teeth to go back to using the IMPAC program. Oh the other thing that drives me nuts is we have to wait for electronic signature before printing to mail out, as there is no auto send, or print on approval wont go to transcription printer etc so you are constantly checking for approved documents to send out and we have 5 dictators so we are constantly flipping back and forth between pt manager, time planner and document approval versus it all being one program. I could just go on and on all day, I would rather at this point be typing in old school word perfect and saving it to a floppy disc. We have gone paperless at this point with no charts and scanning in documents and labeling them is a nightmare, I had a somewhat wonderful suggestion for sorting out that whole mess, but our data administrator refused to do it. To my mind, transcription should not be the mercy of an IT tech with no medical knowledge and no transcription knowledge. Another solution I can offer is to type it all in Word and then create the document and paste it into Aria, potentially without autofills it would make it somewhat faster, at least the typing portion. Hope that helps!
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Aria/Word
The previous poster's reply about typing every single word and character is unfortunate because that was unnecessary, if you set up your basic Word on your computer to record your HOT keys, macros, auto corrects, they will work within Aria, remember, that Word version shadows the real program on your computer, so the dictionary had to be attached to the "real" version of Word on the computer as it will not work on the "Aria version of Word"... this is where the dictionary should have been directed to, and then anything going on with your "real" Word program does transfer over and works when you are working in Aria. Whenever there are upgrades to Aria, make sure your IT tech is backing up your macros & your "dictionary"- I add words to my spell checker all the time - in addition to the medical dictionary that I have attached to it. Unfortunately, there is no way to back up the autocorrects that we have discovered yet, so those will have to be reprogrammed. You can get Word to create a print off what is in your auto correct list so you can reload them in after Word/Aria has been reinstalled- I found this tip in Google.
Aria is not designed to have transcription
I used this garbage briefly when I worked in house for an oncology practice last year. The transcription manager spent $5k on Stedman's only to find that it wasn't compatible. She probably should have checked that out before she spent the money, huh? I worked there for four months typing every single character of every word. Fortunately we were paid hourly. Theoretically it is not compatible with Word, but we all had "normals" that we had created for the doctors that we would cut and paste into it, so I'm not sure where the incompatibility comes from. Maybe from the fact that the transcription manager wasn't that computer literate.
I had many of the same issues you do with the lag on the text. We would type and then literally have to wait a full minute for it to get onto the screen. One of the ways I found around that was to turn my computer off every night. IT told us to just log off and leave them on and when I did that I would get the lag. If I turned it off, no problems. I quite frankly didn't care what IT thought at that point.
The nice part about it is you can put some decent templates in - or whoever has access to that can. They can insert the vitals and lab work automatically if it's set up for it.
I looked at the Aria website when I was using the program and didn't see anything about transcription, so I think it's designed to truly be a point and click system with no transcription whatsoever. Some doctors are always going to want narrative reports, so a true point and click is never going to exist, imo. It's expensive, and I didn't think it was that great, at least from my viewpoint of using it. When I was at the clinic last year, they were supposedly one of the first ones to have it and they had spent some horrible amount of millions to get it.
There were ways to work around it so that we could be sort of productive - primarily with saving the normals for each individual doctor - and I don't know if they managed to get any kind of Expander or dictionary program that worked with it. The clinic I was at also didn't do their research on the sound files, which I don't think came with Aria. They had to get a separate voice recording system, and then the Transcription manager and her pseudo-assistant had to actually move the work over to each transcriptonist every day. It was horribly inefficient.
Good luck. It has a few good points, but the bad points far outweighed them from what I saw from the transcription end. I think from the practice management end it's a decent program. It was just designed by someone who had never worked with the medical records division before, imo.
Aria Platform - anyone use this piece of junk?
We're transitioning to an EMR platform called Aria with a god-awful transcription section that is a step backward from the typewriter. It's largely mouse-dependent, slow (it's through their VPN so there's often a lag on the text) and it doesn't recognize a lot of the hot keys I've utilized in Word for years. It takes me half again as long to get through a report. I'm usually busy at least 8 hours a day as it is using Word with most of the people I type - it would take me 12 hours if everyone were on this system right now.
They've also changed to a "per dictated minute" rate of pay from 65 cpl w/spaces. It's a generous per-minute rate compared to most places I've worked, and they've stated they don't want anyone losing any money in the transition, but it would take a pretty steep increase in this rate to match what I was making previously.
I'm seriously considering changing jobs, although these guys have been wonderful to work with. Does anyone out there have any experience with this platform or any tips, websites, etc., that have information on utilizing this POS to its fullest? Hate to jump ship prematurely - I know what's out there and it ain't purty! 
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