You may on occasion run into an issue where you experience slowness when using the practice management system. The slowness could be an issue with our systems, but it could also be a network issue that is just impacting your practice.
To help us troubleshoot the issue we would need you to provide us with more details which would include the following information:
- Area of slowness: Searching for patients, moving from screen to screen, etc.
- Time of slowness: Is there a specific time that the slowness happens? For example does it always start at 7PM EST and how long does it last?
- How long has it been happening: Did it just start or has it been happening for the last few days or more?
- Number of computers affected: Is it just a specific one having the issue or is it happening on all of them? How many total computers do you have that are using the program?
- Type of network connection: Are your computers on Wi-Fi or are they connected directly to the network with a cable?
- Cellphone results: When you login using a cellphone (or other device) that is not connected to your office network, is the response the same or faster?
- Response time: Does it normally take only 5 seconds to search on a patient or go to another screen and what is the response time when you see the slowness?
- Speed test results: Run a speed test using the instructions below and include those results.
- Ping test results: When you are experiencing the slowness run a ping test using the instructions below.
Internet speeds
At the very least we ask that clinics have a 30mbps download connection speed. More is always better. Anything less than this and your experience with the system can suffer.
Other factors in your speed are how many devices you plan on connecting at the same time in your practice. Devices being anything from desktops, laptops, tablets, even cell phones. Be aware that other programs, such as streaming video, audio or VOIP applications, may utilize significant bandwidth, and therefore may impact your performance if your speed and bandwidth is too low.
4 or less devices - 30mbps recommended
More than 4 devices - 50mbps recommended
Perform a Speed test
Running a speed test will let you know if you are meeting the minimum speed requirements that are recommended.
If you go to https://www.speedtest.net/ you can run a test to see the connection speed.
Click on GO and it will run the test.
You can click on the first icon to the left of "Share" to send a copy of the results to Support.
Running a network ping test
You can run a ping test on any computer while you are experiencing slowness. The ping test will show if there are any time-outs or very slow responses. To learn more about ping tests and how to look at the results click here.
For Windows computers:
Go to the Window Start Menu and type in Run.
Then in run window type CMD to bring up the black command prompt window.
Then in the command prompt window, type the following:
ping -t 8.8.8.8
Press enter and that will start pinging Google's public server and will continue until you stop it,
Leave the ping window running in your Windows taskbar as you work. When you encounter a slowdown, open the window running in your tray and look for any recent ping entries that either show a higher than normal time value, or a "timeout".
To stop the ping test you would do a ctrl + c
For Apple computers:
- Open a new Terminal window (it's located in Applications > Utilities)
- Enter ping 8.8.8.8
- Press Return.
- Let the ping program run. Terminal repeatedly tests the ping of the network - it will keep going until you stop it - so press Ctrl + C when you are finished to quit the Terminal ping test process.
For more advanced users the following command will parse the ping results into a readable format.
ping -t 8.8.8.8|cmd /q /v /c "(pause&pause)>nul & for /l %a in () do (set /p "data=" && echo(!date! !time! !data!)&ping -n 2 8.8.8.8>nul"
And this will use the generate the same results but place them in a file named pingresults.txt on the root of the C:\ drive
Note: This will not display on the command prompt as it is writing to the file and the user will need to make sure they have the rights to the file location)
ping -t 8.8.8.8|cmd /q /v /c "(pause&pause)>nul & for /l %a in () do (set /p "data=" && echo(!date! !time! !data!)&ping -n 2 8.8.8.8>nul" > c:\pingresults.txt
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