Monthly Archives: May 2013

Sherman Clay and Steinway fans in Modesto

Performing Masterpieces in the Operating Room

We are proud to have acquired a fine Steinway Piano from Sherman Clay Pianos in Walnut Creek, CA, almost 10 years ago when we moved to Modesto, CA. It was a symbol to us that we had “made it.” Tammy had become a full fledged Plastic Surgeon and for me, a General Surgeon. On Friday, 5/31/13 Sherman Clay, is closing its doors after 142 years of being America’s Finest Piano Dealer. The owners are retiring, and they deserve a standing ovation for all they have done for the piano arts. We wish Justin Levitt the manager of the Sherman Clay store in Walnut Creek a wonderful future with Steinway & Sons. He is a pianist, composer, Carnegie Hall performer, and an ambassador for all things piano.

Both Dr. Wu and I play the piano.

Steinway Piano

Dr. Lee and Dr. Wu’s Steinway Piano

Our Steinway Piano (Model B, 6’11”, 760 lbs) acquired in 2004 from Sherman Clay Pianos in Walnut Creek.  Tammy wanted to purchase the piano to go along with my violin playing.  But I couldn’t resist the urge to play the piano as well, and I’m glad she decided upon this high caliber instrument.    I had learned some piano as a child but had been “fired” by my piano teacher.  In college, I came up with this idea that in order to become a better violinist, I needed to learn piano.  So, I  sneaked in piano lessons with great piano teacher Arlene Cole at Brown University.  I wasn’t nearly anywhere good enough to be one of her regular students, but she allowed me to take lessons with her on the side for one summer. Then of course, medical school took over and I had forgotten about the piano until Tammy brought it up in 2004 as one of her interests and insisted on the best piano we could obtain and fit into our first house.   We have moved 3 times since 2003 and I’ve nearly had heart attacks each time the piano was moved, but it has fared well.

Currently I’ve been teaching myself some piano and here’s some Cosmetic Surgery finger dexterity practicing on Chopin’s Minute Waltz.

dr-wu-and-dr-lee

We believe in performing great masterpieces on stage and in the operating room

180% increase in 1 year in the number of patients enrolled in Brilliant Distinctions in our Modesto Office: Surgical Artistry

botox bottles

New statistics! Compared to last year, we have a 180% increase in the number of patients taking advantage of rebates & coupons from Brilliant Distinctions.   In dollar amounts, we have more than a 235% increase.  As of 5/30/13 $47,085 has been redeemed by Surgical Artistry patients through this program.  I’d like to congratulate our staff, the Botox staff, and most of all thank our patients.  Actual numbers:

5/30/13 data reveals:

  • Total number of patients  573

  • They have redeemed a total of  $47,085  with Allergan’s Brilliant Distinction (BD) program

     

Brilliant Distinctions

5/20/12 data reveals:

  • Total number of patients  317

  • They have acquired a total of  $19,960  via Allergan’s Brilliant Distinction (BD) program

     

 

dr-wu-and-dr-lee

PrognoCIS EMR scheduling time mismatch solved

prognocis logo

PrognoCis EMR shows that patients are one hour behind in the scheduler!

In the past, all I had to do for a problem like this was to make sure the zoom was at 100% setting rather than anything else.  The zoom feature is in the lower right corner of Internet Explorer.  But now it was different.

EMR frustrations Calvin Lee

Windows Updated and Killed PrognoCis

Today, I came to work and found that my EMR had all the wrong times.   Patients on the schedule were shown to come in 1 hour earlier than they were supposed to.  So I always felt that patients were one hour late.

What happened was that my Windows 7 operating system had installed an automatic update that turned my IE9 (Internet Explorer) to IE10.

I’ll present my solution and the more elegant PrognoCIS solution

I reverted IE10 back to IE9, and told windows not to do any more updates.  

Note: this might be a bit drastic and unsafe for security reasons – there are options to choose for manually installing and choosing which updates you’d want – that’s more of a practical solution – I just picked the NO UPDATES choice as a dramatic chance to AUTOMATICALLY INSTALL UPDATES.

This indeed fixed the scheduler mis-match of times.  And I think this will prevent new installations until I want them.

We work hard to keep PrognoCis the way we want to with all the custom settings typed in and also we also surf the internet with Chrome to avoid messing up Internet Explorer – it’s a shame for Windows to just come in and destroy all that for our PrognoCis settings.  So this method works for me.

How to Revert IE10 back to IE9

  1. Start -> type in the box: “view installed updates” -> enter ->, find Internet Microsoft Explorer 10 -> right click on it and select uninstall
  2. Reboot computer

How to remove automatic updates

  1. Start -> type in the box: “windows update” -> enter -> click “change settings” -> select “Never check for updates (not recommended) or whatever level you want.

 

If you want something more elegant, for example – to use IE10, try the below instructions which I haven’t tried:

I wrote to PrognoCIS and they suggested a BETTER SOLUTION rather than my workaround:

By the way, PrognoCIS EMR wrote me back within 1.5 hours – this is very impressive!  And they sent me a PDF file with detailed instructions on how to do the following.

Hello Calvin,

Thank you for contacting tech support.

Please pull up the PrognoCIS site then go to Tools > Compatibility view settings >click on “Add” or add “prognocis.com” > Check the check mark of “Display all website in compatibility view” > click on “ok” button. After that please login to PrognoCIS and check it.

Also please zoom size of internet explorer, it should be 100%.

Hope this helps. Please let us know if you  have any query.

Here’s a screenshot of what they sent me as directions for Compatibility View in IE10

compatibility view prognocis

click to get a bigger picture

Additional Commentary from Calvin Lee regarding the tech support message

I wanted to add to others that you might have to press “ALT” to get the “tool” menu item to come up in the Internet Explorer.

dr-wu-and-dr-lee

Date for Surgical Artistry Modesto Marathon 2014

Tentative Date set for the Surgical Artistry Modesto Marathon

  • This will be the 5th annual Surgical Artistry Modesto Marathon
  • The date is tentative.
  • March 23, 2014 – this is a Sunday
  • Check the official date with the official webpage for the Surgical Artistry Modesto Marathon:  www.modestomarathon.com
  • The first three years the marathon was one Sunday earlier.  In 2013, it was moved to one Sunday later in the year.

Good luck and we hope to see you at the Surgical Artistry Modesto Marathon.

dr-wu-and-dr-lee

Tammy Wu, MD Plastic Surgeon
Calvin Lee, MD General Surgeon

 

 

Explanation of spending $50 per day on FaceBook ads

 facebook

I was recently asked a question about FaceBook Ads:

I still am unclear about your $50/day you “allocation” to your marketing that you referred to. Does FB charge you by the day?

My answer about CPC and CPM daily budget for FaceBook Advertising:

Sorry… I didn’t explain well enough. Thank you for asking. You set how much you want to budget and Facebook charges you two ways (in general) – each time the ad shows, or each time the ad is clicked. Let’s say you click on my ad and it costs me $2. then $2 gets subtracted from the $50 per day limit until I don’t have any money left. Then it resets the next day. But you can set it to $15 per day or $100 per day. It eats up money fast though. It does take some time to set up, and FaceBook changes it’s policies and screens (select options) all the time. You can set a bid for how much you want to pay per click or right now you can just let FaceBook decide how much it wants to take from you – slightly adverturesome – but if you’re desperate for ads, you can do that too. I remember when I started with FaceBook ads several years ago, it was something like 25 cents per click, now it’s more like several dollars per click. The price has gone up significantly in my opinion

So if you hate someone’s ad (which I know you don’t but just in case), you can click on it several times and deplete their allocation – I think – I’m not sure if FaceBook has a mechanism for detecting this sort of behavior. Or you can do what I do, I split the ads up into two different types of ads, one per click (CPC) and one per impression (CPM). The impression type – it doesn’t charge you if a customer clicks on it. So if I get a “hater” – which of course I don’t have any… right? – then they can click a million times on my “impression” ad, and it just costs the same. The impression ads are called CPM (cost per thousand) not sure why it isn’t called CPT, but then it becomes some medical code I guess. But you just say how much you want to pay per thousand impressions.

In general I like CPC.  I think it gets me a better placement on the list of ads.

But I’m also unclear what happens on a mobile device.  They might not get ads at all?  I’m not sure right now.  I don’t really use mobile devices that much at this time.  Perhaps someone could comment.

One more twist, there are several options for payment and account allocation:  you could set it up per day or you could set it up per entire duration of the ad campaign, ie. 1 week, etc.  I like per day, because I could change the intensity of the advertising as we go along.

Hope that helps.

 dr-wu-and-dr-lee

Surgical Artistry - Calvin Lee, MD / Tammy Wu, MD

Surgical Artistry
Calvin Lee, MD
Tammy Wu, MD
209-551-1888
www.SurgeryToday.com
2336 Sylvan Ave. Suite C
Modesto, CA 95355
Next to Post office on Sylvan