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Hi all!
Buckle up, because this is going to be a long ride.
This is my first post to the CHUG, and I'm hopeful that I'll get the kind of response I'm looking for.
A little background, I'm a contractor technician working for a clinic in a small, rural community. My company has been working for these fine folks for a good many years. The clinic has recently, just as many of you reading this, implemented EMR. They've been live with Centricity PS for coming up on two years now. We started on CPS 9, quickly moved into CPS 10, and this past August, we installed CPS 12.
And, I've personally never been more disappointed with a product in my entire life.
I've come here today to climb up on a soapbox and see if there is anyone else who has had the same experiences we've had. Experiences that range from annoying little system crashes (anyone ever try pressing the "TAB" key to move between fields in the Inquiry module?), to service pack updates that systematically take our entire system offline for days at a time while GE' finest scratch their heads in bewilderment.
We've run the circle of emotions from disappointment to shock, bewilderment, and rage, and finally to comedy. My last bit of correspondence to GE: (the names have been removed to protect the innocent)
Dear ___ and ___,
I’m furious.
I just wasted spent 2 hours on a call with___. (Who, by the way, is as patient and understanding and knowledgeable as anyone I’ve ever met. Kudos) We were trying to troubleshoot what ___ and I saw as a glaring issue within our newly-live Immunization Management system. I won’t get into details here, but as the call was finishing up without having made any forward progress, I decided to ask ___ to demonstrate on his own database that our problem was truly our own and not another “product defect.” Guess what?
I can’t understand why GE would turn its own customers into software beta testers. Why are we, a functioning clinic providing healthcare to living human beings, PAYING for a product that’s not a finished product; a product with a “known defect” list that must be dozens of pages long; a product that even HAS a “known defect” list? Frankly, I feel like you should be paying us. And so that’s how I’m going to handle this. GE Healthcare will be receiving a bill for 2 hours of premium beta testing, bug tracking and troubleshooting from my company. And GE Healthcare will be wiping out any possible “billable hours” that may have been associated with today’s call with ___ (bless his heart.) TEST YOUR OWN DAMN PRODUCT!
And what about your other customers? Anyone who is less diligent about testing the broken bloat lovely new features that GE rolls out on a regular basis isn’t even aware that their immunization historical views aren’t showing correct data. You could potentially have patients out there being given 15 Flu vaccines a year, and your customers would have no way of knowing it! How CPS and CEMR managed to get a CMS certification is beyond my reckoning.
And so I come to my question, dear CHUGgers. What have your various experiences been like? Is anyone else feeling like they were duped into paying to beta test a product that never should have been released? Anyone run into issues that were painfully obvious to you as a clinician, or a technician, or even a layman, but were somehow overlooked by GE's own development team? Has anybody seen potential threats posed to your patients because you can't trust your own charting software? Or is it just that we are not capable of making the product work for us, and that my team and I have failed our employer?
Posted : November 20, 2014 1:28 pm
I think by now everyone on here, besides those that work for GE will admit that there are serious stability issues with Centricity, in addition to horrible customer support. We too have had issues like you stated and we've called and complained and all they do is point the fingers back at us and says it is our servers, which is false as I have worked enough with servers, ever Solid State Servers, and there is no software that I have ever used that is unstable like this one.
I was hired her 3 years ago, which now all I do mostly is get CPS to work at our office. I have custom built applications to work with GE and to replace some parts of GE. This is the only way we can really complete the charts as needed. I have also replaced all systems with Solid State Drives which help out a lot, but you really shouldn't have to do that...
If you need any assistance with your issues, I've gone through and fixed what I could, let me know. Would be glad to help with what I can.
Posted : November 20, 2014 1:42 pm
Believe me, I feel your pain - between the crashes and "known issues" - have you noticed that everything that you report is a known issue already - my question is, then why don't they get it fixed??
Posted : November 21, 2014 5:01 am
We started out on the original product Logician in 1999, couldn't have been happier with the EMR. There have always been issues with printing if using Citrix but we managed. In Sept 2013 we moved from the practice management system that we had used forever, obviously going through their product updates, to CPS 11. In Feb 2014, we moved from CEMR 9.5 to the combined CPS 11 product and in June to CPS 12. I have been so disappointed with the product, GE's decision to totally change how CQM's would be counted (having to have an order for an ov or SNOMED code) and not bother to let clients know -- like this time LAST year!! Our printing issues seem to have quadrupled - not knowing if it's truly a Citrix issue or CPS issue. It's strange that the other products we have in Citrix don't have the same printing issues that CPS has. We looked at their new AR Accelerator product this week and it looks great however, it just eats at me that we have to pay additional money to get something to make their product better...to give us more automation that CPS PM is lacking?!?! Especially in this time of reduced reimbursements, from all insurances! Well, if they know that providers are getting hammered by insurance carriers reducing what they are going to pay, then why not help out but adding additional functionality without expecting more money.
Posted : November 21, 2014 5:43 am
We too have been on the original product since 1995 and have been very pleased until now. We are to the point of entertaining the idea of a different product. We are upgrading this weekend to EMR 9.8 and we are just dreading the complications we are so much hearing about. I am going to jump on the band wagon and whine a little bit about another BIG problem that I have been enlightened with. Buckle up because here I go.....
MediSpan, the Third Party Vendor that supplies us with Diagnosis Codes and Medications needs to QC the product before it is released to the customers. For example, per Lee Ford, Regulatory Services Manager, at our worksite, in looking at HIV and the dx tables received within our product we see the dx 042. The problem with this scenario is that 042 is the diagnosis of AIDS not HIV. HIV means that a patient is diagnosed with the HIV disease, yet has not coverted to the dx of AIDS, so HIV should be reflected by a dx from the subcategory V08. From a clinical, legal, and risk perspective having the severe risk of pollution in a diagnosis table is extremely concerning and evident that no one is QC'ing a product before it is released. Imagine the great impact to those practices selecting the wrong dx because of an error due to a polluted diagnosis table. Then if not caught and corrected, the dx could potentially be reported on the claim and sent to the payer- thus giving a patient a dx in error....and the risk continues forward- all due to the lack of basic oversight and review before releasing a product to a customer. If you haven't already done so, please ensure you review the code table(s) received from GE- you'll see your 'GE lightbulb' dim before you. Hopefully it'll be a different brand of lightbulb- so it will actually illuminate for you when you review the code tables and ensure they are correct.
Posted : November 21, 2014 10:43 am
I can feel your pain, and can say we have been through some hard times too. Things got so bad here more than once with doctors asking why we are sticking with GE. It is darn near an impossible task to move to some other vendor but it can be done but which one would you pick? Is there and alternative out there which is perfect today and guarantees perfection indefinitely? If so, sign me up!
We have been on GE EMR and PM, then CPS for about 10 years now. Our experiences have been good/bad but we push through. CPS is a very complex product made up of various products from different vendors. In our case (Biscom Faxcom, Nuance Dragon Medical, Kryptiq DM, Portal, ERx, Qvera HL7 interfaces, CCC content). Dig into the GE product itself and you will find the remnants of the Millbrook/Medical Logic code, as well as stuff from GE and probably other vendors. No software is perfect so you may as well "buckle up" chat with us here in the forum and try to push through.
In defense of GE, lots of this government mandated stuff like ICD-10 and CQR with hard deadlines makes designing and maintaining something like CPS even more difficult. Sure, ICD-10 was delayed but only after much begging from people lobbying congress and that was after we upgraded to CPS 11 to start our ICD-10 training and transition. CQR is seeming like it was designed to not be attainable in 2015 so unless the Government backs off a little bit (or a lot); we will have wasted resources trying to comply if they require a 365 day attestation period.
I can tell you how we (try to) survive:
Great staff who understands the importance of detailed troubleshooting of errors. Although she is not really an IT person we have a clinical person on staff who does templates, CQR gathering, HIPAA stuff etc. She has been a wonderful addition to the team since we hired her.
Troubleshooting skills are important.
You will be feeling like you are beta testing software for sure. So do what beta testers do. Document things, manage SRs with GE as well as SPRs to be sure they show up in service packs. I even wrote some scripts to aggregate the .dmp files so I could see who is getting which errors. This helps when deciding to install or skip certain service packs. CHECK HERE 🙂
Sandboxed Test servers with new product installed on a backup of our DB before actual upgrades of major releases and service packs. We sometimes don't do the upgrades after reading horror stories here on the forum. This also is used for training. Vmware helps
Always take the "recommended", not minimal hardware suggestions from GE. It seems like you have a handle on that already. Network throughput is also important.
Watch out for Microsoft updates, especially with Internet Explorer.
Weekly reboots of all servers
Read the release notes thoroughly before doing service packs. GE is doing a better job letting us know what to expect SPR-wise, but they still seem slow to address certain issues which have a SPR but not yet in major releases and SPs.
The bulk of my job here is to support the GE "Octopus" which has more tentacles than ever. Now we have to carefully reboot servers in order so they don't malfunction. Creative scripting is essential.
Not sure if any of this helps but there is my $.02
Mike Zavolas
Tallahassee Neurological Clinic
Posted : November 26, 2014 11:42 am
I couldn't agree more with the person who originally posted this item. We too are extremely frustrated and have been put through the ringer over the last year trying to work with GE as an early adopter for CEMR 9.8. Every time we think we may have cleared the last hurdle a new one pops up unexpectedly. The latest challenge was in regard to the PQRS requirements (must upgrade to SP7; must append hundreds of thousands of office visits to add snomed or CPT codes; must install CQR) and thankfully we found another vendor to do our PQRS reporting for us (at a lower cost too).
My biggest frustration though is with CQR. I am very concerned with the architecture of this tool and the reliability and validity of the data that the physicians will be using to attest for Meaningful Use. It really makes no sense to me that the only data GE is feeding into the CQR reporting tool is a CCDA document when there is a vast amount of structured data sitting in the Oracle database.
I was recently on a call with GE where I was told that if there are tests that are resulted in the flowsheet without an order or if the orders are not completed then I would need to install a kit to count the item from the observation term on the flowsheet. But if after that observation term is counted in the reporting tool, someone were to complete the orders then it would count that procedure as having been done twice!
I have thought a lot about this and I really feel like we need to use the CHUG forum to be a single loud voice to GE about CQR. I am very worried the data will not be correct and then we will be stuck unable to attest for Meaningful Use. I would be interested in the thoughts of others on this site as well.
Thanks
Posted : December 1, 2014 10:51 am
This is a great thread and one that I agree with completely. How have I missed this until now? I guess I've been running around with fire extinguishers chasing the octopus.
Posted : April 30, 2015 4:11 am
