Long time user. – DrChrono EHR / EMR Review

I have used this successfully since October 2012. The company has gone through a lot of growth since then and there were a lot of growing pains when I first started. I will say they always did scramble to get things right and they have kept their word on several things that date back to problems that occurred during these early years. For that I am grateful. SALES FORCE: I have found them honest and straightforward. The really isn’t much to it. The plants are fairly straightforward and simple but you really should carefully scrutinize the plans before you choose an option. However it is simple to switch. They were open to negotiations regarding changing a few features or allowing me extra volumes on some features since I was not using others. Also they have kept their word on pricing. On rare occasions I have another doctor cover for me and I did not want to pay the entire fee for an additional person. They accommodated us. They gave me a reasonable discount. SUPPORT: I customize all my templates. It’s the nature of what I do. So this may or may not apply to you. And this is a terrific feature. However it is this area that was the weakest but has slowly ground with fits and starts in tween much improved system. It is nearly impossible to call anybody at support. They call you after an email. They do it on their own time. That time is almost never good since we obviously are in practices that are busy. You would think they would understand that allowing us to call them and reach a person would be imperative. When a connection is finally made the solution is either a hand and the support person knows it or it is turned over to developers. That’s where the trouble can really start! However I find this a universal problem regarding clinical practice of medicine and development of Internet technologies. Going back to the telephone issue I have found it very frustrating to be forced to write the issue in an email type response system only to have a back-and-forth where the support person completely misses the point time and time again. Then they might ask you for screenshots. Then for sessions just sit down and they can look at your desktop remotely. But to do that you have to get an appointment that you scheduled online through their web based system. Quite often their appointment times were not at all convenient and overlapped mostly into clinical hours. It could take a long long time to get a point across. I do think the people that work there are quite good and just caught up in the system that is dysfunctional. However it seems I have been assigned a particular person finally to oversee the account and they have merged past issues so that person can handle them. I was promised this in the past and it never materialized. It seems to be well on its way at the moment. I am very pleased with this change. DEVELOPERS: it seems they have different teams for different parts of their product. They have a phone app that is extremely good but does not work exactly like the iPad app and there are limitations of the phone app that do not live up to the iPad app and vice versa! To make matters even more confusing if you use the web based browser on your desktop there are even different features there. I really think they need to make this process a lot better so that you can do anything on the desktop that you can do on the iPad and vice versa. And I mean ANYTHING. It is extremely difficult to enter ICD 10 codes and CPT codes and HCPCS codes on the desktop and phone. It’s a cinch on the iPad though you have to use the desktop to set it up initially if you want to create picklist of options to make it simple. They are sort of like playlists on iTunes. The browser that works best on the desktop seems to change from year to year and I have had breakdowns of the system when I use Chrome lately and breakdowns in the past using Safari. This might be an indication that the company is still young and going through transitions and not able to.all their eyes and cross all their cheese. I do not consider this an issue such that I would not use the system. But it is very frustrating. GENERAL COMMENTS: This does not have a robust feature for tracking each change made in the medical record. In particular the templates are use in essence show no detailed tracking at all. You can get an audit of the activity but it is incomplete so it will show major things such as who opened for lock to note. I think this feature really needs to be fixed. I know there is a lawsuit in New York state that involved in medical record company not accurately tracking things and it turned out to be a huge fine or penalty in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Dr. Chrono can probably do a better job than that company. I think they already are. But this needs to be improved for us to feel safe about who is gaining access to the EHR and what changes are specifically being made. The tracking is much better if you do not use custom templates. But since custom templates are featured, it should have this ability throughout the system. If two users on different iPads are on the same page it reeks havoc on the data. You can lose an entire page. Data loss can also occur on the desktop. You have to be very careful to make sure when you are on the desktop that what you entered was actually excepted. There is a small bright red notification that will appear if the data was not excepted but it is hidden if you are scrolled and working at the bottom of the note. This is a rather astonishingly difficult thing to work with. I have lost long dictation/typed in text entries because of this. The desktop based work I perform is when I need to do a lot of free hand typing. It’s pretty common to have to do so and if I can’t rely on the EHR successfully storing this information then it becomes extremely frustrating. I have more to say, but there seems to be a limit on what I can enter.
Review by gregg1954 on DrChrono EHR / EMR.