Ask PCC For a Software Feature or Enhancement

PCC uses your requests and comments to help decide which features and services to develop. We depend on your feedback; we can’t make software without you.

Read the article below to learn the best way to submit a feature enhancement request.

Step 1: Determine the Need Behind Your Request

The most important step to effectively communicate your feature or enhancement request to PCC is to clearly understand the need.

PCC is dedicated to removing obstacles to practicing medicine. What obstacles are you facing, and how are they interfering with your workflow, slowing down your day, and preventing you from providing care to your patients?

As an example, you may have in mind a “feature request” for PCC, such as:

• a new screen where I can enter additional vaccine information
• a new blood pressure field on the chart note
• a nurse messaging feature in PCC EHR

…however, if you ask for the button, screen, or field you have in mind as a solution, PCC may struggle to understand what you wish to accomplish.

Instead, work with your clinicians or talk to PCC Support to discover the underlying need behind the request. Such as:

• My practice needs to track and report NDC codes for immunization lots when reporting to a state agency in order to be certified. Otherwise, we will not receive a program’s incentive payment.
• We sometimes record infant Blood Pressure on the patient’s leg, so we need to be able to indicate the leg to properly record that information in the patient’s chart, so we can compare “apples-to-apples” when looking at BP measurements over time.
• My nurses don’t know when they need to do a venipuncture. I need a way to tell them, or they will enter the room and not bring the proper equipment with them.

Bonus Surprise Solutions: When you work to identify the problem, sometimes PCC can help you find a solution that you may not have been aware of. PCC’s products have a lot of little-known features, and your PCC Client Advocate can help you discover great new workflow solutions. For example… did you know that PCC software can already track NDC codes, indicate that blood pressure was taken on a leg, and alert nurses to specific orders?

Step 2: Send Your Request to support@pcc.com

PCC carefully reviews and responds to every communication sent to support@pcc.com. We love to hear how PCC might improve your workflow and help you in your day-to-day efforts to improve quality of care.

When you craft your message to PCC Support, what can you write that will help best communicate your request?

Consider the following tips:

• Use PCC's Magic User Story Formula: Try to craft your e-mail in the following structure: “As a… I need… so that…”. For example, “As a clinician, I need a way to indicate that I took blood pressure on the infant’s left leg, so that I am properly charting how I took blood pressure and all of my clinicians can understand the chart record and BP history later.” When you use this format, PCC will be certain to have the basic information they need to understand your request.

• Talk to Your Client Advocate: Before and after you send your request, be sure and share your needs with your Client Advocate during your regularly scheduled PCC Support call. PCC Support wants to make sure your voice is heard, and they can help explore existing solutions or gather additional details that may help clarify your request.

Step 3: What Else Can I Do?

Now that PCC is tracking your enhancement request, is there anything else you can do about your need?

• Offer to Provide Research Guidance: Can PCC call you and your staff and talk about your needs? When you send a request to PCC, let them know that you are available for an interview about the issue. During the research and development process, we interview Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and the insight of you and your colleagues can be enormously helpful.

• Offer to Be a Beta Tester or Pilot Tester: Does your practice have a high tolerance for disruption? Consider offering your practice as a beta or pilot tester for early, unfinished software. We test new software components, features, and releases with practices that care about the features and can test them thoroughly. Speak to your Client Advocate about becoming one of PCC’s beta or pilot testers.

• Attend the PCC Users' Conference: PCC’s annual UC is a great environment to discuss the problems your practice is facing. You can use our Wishing Well and Roadmap planning sessions to voice your needs, and you can find other practices that have similar challenges and explore solutions together. At our Roadmap planning session, we invite you to participate in identifying priorities among all the different needs and requests that pediatric offices share.

• Find Other Solutions on PCCTalk: PCCTalk is an online forum where PCC-using practices discuss problems and solutions, from coding to practice workflow. If you ask how other offices have dealt with an issue, they may surprise you with inventive solutions that PCC Support may not know about.

  Note: PCC does not use PCCTalk as a source of enhancement requests or to solicit feature feedback. We do not “count votes” from PCCTalk and rarely add PCCTalk user comments to our tracking software.

• Stay Tuned for PCC Futures, New Release Web Labs, and PCC Documentation: PCC is always building new software and services to meet client needs. A solution may already be on its way! If you read The Pulse, PCC’s newsfeed, you’ll be notified about PCC Futures and all release announcements so that you’ll be the first to learn about exciting new improvements.

• Try Again, Ask For an Update, Talk More!: It doesn’t hurt to periodically check in about your requests! When you talk with your Client Advocate, be sure and continue to share the different challenges your practice is facing and how you’d like PCC to help. Once again, refer back to rule #1: always describe your challenge and how it interferes with your practice’s efforts to care for patients. PCC pays special attention to those challenges, and what we hear helps steer our software development as well as future services and strategic choices that we make long-term.

PCC’s entire reason for existing is to solve the problems your practice is facing, and we need your help to do it! As always, call or e-mail PCC Support at any time to discuss how we can help your practice meet new challenges.