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