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.
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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 a button, screen, or field, 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. For example:
- 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 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 a need instead of a solution, PCC Support can help you discover available workflows. For example, 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 very communication sent to support@pcc.com. We love to hear how PCC could 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:
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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.” When you use this format, PCC will have the basic information they need to understand your request.
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Talk to PCC Support: Before and after you send your request, share your needs with PCC Support or your Client Advocate. PCC Support wants to make sure your voice is heard, and they can help explore existing solutions and gather additional details that will help clarify your request.
Step 3: What Else Can I Do?
Now that PCC knows your enhancement request, is there anything else you can do about your need?
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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.
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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 pre-release software. We test new features with practices that can test them thoroughly. Speak to PCC Support about becoming one of PCC’s beta or pilot testers.
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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. You can attend PCC’s UC in-person or virtually.
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Discuss 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 do not add PCCTalk user comments to our tracking software.
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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.
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Try Again, Ask For an Update, Talk More: It doesn’t hurt to periodically check in about your requests! When you talk with PCC Support, be sure and continue to share the different challenges your practice is facing and how you’d like PCC to help. 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.
