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How is your relationship with your sales rep? (Direct Customer, not a VAR)

CPS, C-EMR, PM

Last Post by Anonymous 1 second ago

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tnc

(@tnc)

Posts: 517

Honorable Member

Topic starter

We have been attempting to get in touch with a sales rep (any rep would do), to go over a few things about our bill and to add a doctor license since we have added a doctor. The last thing we would want is some sort of audit showing that we do not have the right amount of licenses for our doctors but so far we have been unsuccessful in talking to anyone about this. Do you guys (direct customers) have this problem as well?

We called the number on the bill and soon after we were redirected to "our sales rep" who shall remain nameless in this semi public forum. No call back. I guess the person with whom we actually spoke was "inside sales", whatever that means. I used to think inside/outside actually meant the outside reps actually visited customer sites but we only ever had a sales rep on site when we had a really good rep who is no longer at GE.

We called the main number at GE and left a voicemail

We emailed the rep who is allegedly assigned to our account and there has been no response.

I just went to e-service to document my problem there as a "technical issue" but in the past this has not worked either because it really is not a tech issue. I get that, but what are we supposed to do?

I am just curious if it is just me or if this is a common issue.

At my former employer we used a VAR. This would have been around 2001/2002 timeframe. We were in the middle of an upgrade when the rug was pulled out from under us with either the VAR going out of business, and/or Millbrook/GE no longer allowing VARs to sell product. I do see that this has since changed since 2001/2 because I see VARs here on the forum. How many of you guys use VARs?

Mike Zavolas
Tallahassee Neurological Clinic

Posted : May 10, 2016 4:25 am

acantu

(@acantu)

Posts: 722

Prominent Member

Not a fun one, I have another contact that i know at GE who gets his attention then we hear a response. But mostly we are in the same situation as you. We do not use VARs though, as I usually figure it out on my own, or build solutions to by-pass GE faults. But if it is urgent, I contact my contact who will get our Rep to finally contact us.

Posted : May 10, 2016 4:31 am

Scott Forest

(@sforest)

Posts: 527

Honorable Member

We have the exact same problem... makes me wonder if we have the same rep. We have had to go to their manager to get a response and then the response comes within the hour. Last time we did that, it came in 22 minutes. We only contact our rep to spend money, its insane to me that they can't even respond via email. Months have gone by without responses.

Posted : May 10, 2016 5:54 am

gpincomb

(@gpincomb)

Posts: 278

Reputable Member

We have a pretty good relationship with our Sales Rep, but we have also dealt with a gentleman at GE to get movement on some of our SR's. His title is Service Relationship Manager and his name is Robert Delker ([email protected]). I don't know if he is assigned to specific accounts like ours or if he works with all accounts, but I think you could reach out to him with your issue and if nothing else he should be able to put you in contact with your own SRM if he is not the one on your account.

Another thing, I know that you stated that you already opened an SR, but if they close it with no contact, then if I was you I think I might open another one with the Patient Safety answer set to "Potential", because if you were audited and penalized for not being properly licensed can you honestly say that repercussion could not affect your organization's ability to give proper patient care? Even if you only received fines, this could still potentially affect your ability to give proper patient care and any affect to patient care could potentially cause a Safety Issue. If you have any SR's that state that the affected area is used in Patient Care or that "Yes" there is a Patient Safety Issue or that there is a "Potential" Safety Issue, guarantees a call back. You just have to be ready to justify why you selected those options when creating the SR.

Posted : May 10, 2016 7:01 am

ErnieT

(@erniet)

Posts: 479

Honorable Member

So far, I have very good response from my rep, but that may be because she knows I can just drive a half mile up the road and show up at the GE offices where she is 😀

If you would like Mike, I would be happy to send you her contact information. I am sure she would be happy to help.

Just let me know.

Posted : May 10, 2016 9:06 am

lrichardson

(@lrichardson)

Posts: 34

Eminent Member

Hi Mike-

I would be happy to give you some information about VARs. and some options. Feel free to email me at [email protected] or call me direct at 260-415-5820.

Lorie

Posted : May 11, 2016 4:55 am

mpconroy

(@mpconroy)

Posts: 5

Active Member

We have been a Centricity PM customer since 2002. (Our installation occurred during the transition to GE.) We have always been a direct customer and in the early days we had regular contact with our sales team both internal and external. We eventually lost our on-site rep but we did not have a great need and had an EXCELLENT internal sales person. (Rachel Nelson is the best and I hope GE is taking good care of her.) Unfortunately, her territory was changed and it has been downhill since then. It has taken weeks to get a quote and then more weeks to get a sale completed. I recently had a complaint I wanted to address and was told that someone would find out who our representative is but I never heard back. It has been months! There is certainly no proactive communication from them and they probably miss opportunities as a result.

There have been a few gems that have done their best to help but it seems to me that GE makes it hard for them to do their jobs well unless you are an EMR customer with a fairly large installation. There have been little to no improvements to the practice management product in years and while I understand that federal mandates have driven the focus to the EMR product, I feel the support fees we pay every year should provide product improvements and stellar support regardless of what EMR we use or the size of our practice. (We made a conscious decision to install an EMR tailored to ophthalmology which has some pretty specific needs and we did not want to build from scratch. We also understood and respected that GE did not want to customize for this specialty.)

I will say this - Centricity EDI Services and the Centricity support team have always been good to us and that is what keeps us with GE. I have not attended Users' Group meetings for a while because they are so heavily focused on EMR but I am attending the meeting in Phoenix and hope to gain some ground and find appropriate contacts while I am there. Would love to start a coalition of PM only customers who could bring some force to bear on GE. I am going to start a separate post to see if there is any interest and to get a sense of how many PM only customers are out there.

Posted : May 12, 2016 4:42 am

jadcockwa

(@jadcockwa)

Posts: 1

New Member

Call the general Tech support number, leave a message if you have to, and ask for it to be escalated.

Posted : May 14, 2016 4:58 pm

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