In 20+ years of IT, I haven't encountered a piece of software that's lower quality. Unfortunately, we have both CEMR and CPS (PM only), and they both have major quality control issues, and support just seems to want to buy time but never really resolve any issues. There should be a huge investment in development just to get the product up to "par" quality. Many of our doctors despise the system and want us to switch, even knowing how HUGE of an investment that would be.
For example, some of my current cases, most of which have screenshots, recordings, and details gathered by support:
#1 CQR not giving credit for Patient Access even though all requirements seem to be met
#2 CQR hasn't given me 90 day calculations for 3 weeks, even though I request the recalculations DAILY. We need 90 day calcs since we didn't have API until April, so our year calculations are useless. Can't set CQR to auto calculate except for the whole year.
#3 CEMR and CPS can't co-exist on one workstation without either sign-in errors or making every user an Administrator on their PC. Not a good workaround.
#4 CPS 12.3 SP3 doesn't "paint" all text boxes on screen without clicking the mouse on the field first - big problem when Patient Alerts show up blank. Verified on 3 different OS versions and even our Test system.
#5 When CEMR crashes (which is often for a variety of reasons) incorrect patient is shown in the Banner. Crashing when more than one person tries to enter a Patient's chart is probably our most painful problem, and we've been living with it for well over a year and I get no sense it will ever be fixed.
#6 Cursor jumps randomly in Note/text boxes (our doctors just love this... especially when using Dragon.) Applied "fix", it made the problem worse, had to revert the fix from all the workstations.
#7 Schedules get out of sync from CPS to CEMR. I've had a dozen tickets about this over the past 5 years, it clearly will never be fixed.
Thanks,
Wade
i have made similar posts in the past before. EHR/EMR is not my primary job. Logician was a great product. Then GE took over and it has been on a downward sprial ever since then... the current revision is awful. half web forms and half c++ forms or whatever... it is crazy. but yes most of us are too far down the rabbit hole. if we band together maybe get exemptions for penatlites based on horribleness.
I do not work for GE, but have used for many years and have struggled with various issues. And while we experience issues, it is a better product than many others I have worked with.
#1) Check the settings in GE, as there is a place where you can customize how you meet a measure. While you may think you meet, how you do it may not match up with the pre-defined rules. You may need to play with your VFE forms to process differently, etc...
2) CQR is a bolt-on, add-on for reporting. And it has always had that default yearly thing. Our first year, when we were doing quarterly, every week I would go doctor by doctor and recompute so I could analyze progress.
5) Multiple people in the same chart can be problematic. Then again, it is a complex task to keep track of ownership and changes/edits.
6) Perhaps a Dragon issue. While never experienced this here, when I use my laptop I sometimes jump around simply by brushing against the touch-pad. I use external keyboard and mouse.
Again, not trying to defend. But for us, the product has been useful and stable for 18 years.
Hi Joe, thanks for the feedback, and I often wonder if there are happy customers out there. For the price we pay for this software, we expect a lot more than half-broken.
"#1) Check the settings in GE, as there is a place where you can customize..."
We've had to do this with a lot of MIPS related things, but we've gone through everything known to 1st and 2nd level support and they can't find the cause, so they sent it to "engineering". I expect you'll see it as a fix months from now in CQR or EMR...
"2) CQR is a bolt-on, add-on for reporting. And it has always had that default yearly thing. Our first year, when we were doing quarterly, every week I would go doctor by doctor and recompute so I could analyze progress."
Yeah, it stinks even when it works. But... it doesn't work. The 90-day computations either never finish, or they are not updating in CQR. No way to see the results. Again, went to 2nd level support and is now stuck with "engineering"...
At this point, every time they say "engineering" I hear "middle school coding class..."
"5) Multiple people in the same chart can be problematic. Then again, it is a complex task to keep track of ownership and changes/edits."
I know this is mostly a limitation of the 1990's design, and I doubt they can back a fix in for this since they can't handle even trivial updates. But this doesn't work today for doctors seeing 40, 50, 60 patients in a day.
"6) Perhaps a Dragon issue. While never experienced this here, when I use my laptop I sometimes jump around simply by brushing against the touch-pad. I use external keyboard and mouse."
Not a Dragon issue, we've exhausted everything possible and it's a product issue. We've duplicated this on dozens of different PCs, servers, with and without Dragon, etc. Support even acknowledges the problem and they supposedly have improved it in EMR 9.12 SP3, but they also admit it is not fixed entirely. Of course, the last fix was supposed to improve it but made it worse, so... my expectations are low. If there is any improvement at all, I'll be pleased.
Wade
Yes, it's a mess of cobbled together pieces over the years. I think what worked in the 1990s when the culture and demands on the doctors and from CMS were very different, the product fit better. But today, new features must be added constantly, doctors are seeing more patients, doctors dictate/Dragon or document on their own, they actually use the system where in 1990 they used it for reference. It should be phased out with a more modern product that addresses all the weaknesses. I'm certain that is the hope from Virence/athenahealth - that they can salvage their unhappy customers and migrate to athenahealth's cloud platform, rather than lose those customers for good. I'm not sure many doctors will go that route, when they feel burned enough by GE/Virence. They're a lot more likely to just change products entirely.
Wade
The Dragon and cursor jumping is something that allegedly was fixed in SP3. Are you saying you have SP3 and still experiencing the same behavior?
PS.
As far as CPS overall - system stability is always a problem when you have a product that is duct taped together and basic design principles (lacking basic input validation for example) are not followed. Product is sub-par.
I do remember a former co-worker in our Informatics department having one medical school user who complained constantly about Centricity. Then left to do their residency and eventually ended up back where we worked and apologized to her, saying the EMR he had to work with was so much worse than Centricity. 🙂
Oddly enough, for us, this seems to happen to some users but not others. I can only assume that it is something they are doing. That is with the cloud version of Dragon. The old installed version has no issues
Mike Zavolas
Tallahassee Neurological Clinic
I would think that it's something the users are doing, but I have seen the same cursor jumping happen countless times when I've been using/testing in EMR. We also have a variety of users with the problem (different job roles and different workflows).
To the question about SP3 - No, with CEMR we are currently 9.12.2. We tried the SP2 Hotfix patch for the cursor jumping and it made the problem worse by all accounts, so we had to revert back to vanilla SP2.
Wade
"I do remember a former co-worker in our Informatics department having one medical school user who complained constantly about Centricity. Then left to do their residency and eventually ended up back where we worked and apologized to her, saying the EMR he had to work with was so much worse than Centricity. :-)"
DavidShower,
So you haven't used an EMR that's worse, but you've heard of someone 3rd hand who has? You're not making a very good case for Centricity. 🙂
Wade