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Topic starter
We are looking for a couple names, numbers, or organization names of places that have successfully upgraded to 9.8 from 95. We are planning on going live this weekend, but would like to bounce a few questions off of anyone that has already upgraded.
Issues, concerns, known safety issues, etc. If anyone has upgraded to 9.8, would you provide a contact name and # so that we might contact you ? Thank you.
John
Faxton St. Lukes healthcare
315-624-5873
Posted : July 29, 2014 1:57 am
We upgraded to 9.8 on 6/28. You can reach me at 513-569-5340.
Eric
Posted : July 30, 2014 12:51 am
Topic starter
Eric,
can you send me an email address that you can be reached at ? Hoping to discuss some post 9.8 issues, but can communicate via email as well. Thanks.
John
Posted : July 30, 2014 2:43 am
We upgraded from EMR 9.5 to CPS 11 in June, and recently applied GE's patch. The issues we've experienced are crippling our clinics. Perhaps going the 9.8 route is a better way to go. If you or anyone else has insight on either of these types of upgrades, we'd like to speak with you, as well.
Thank you,
Mary
Posted : July 30, 2014 4:25 am
Topic starter
Mary,
Thanks for the reply. We are interested in knowing what issues remained after going live. We have had many issues with 9.8 in test, and have decided to postpone our upgrade this weekend, hoping that GE would fix many of the issues. They include inactive meds now showing as active in the Med list, Immunization form not working properly, slowness, crashing, drug interactions not working, etc.
If you could send me your email with some problems that you are experiencing, we would appreciate it.
My info is as follows:
John Mazurowski
315-624-5873
Posted : July 30, 2014 4:46 am
Hi there,
We upgraded in June. We are on 9.8.3.
We've experienced several crashes and have sent crash files to GE.
Keep in mind that your JBoss server is going to require much more RAM.
If you are using MediSpan for Drug Interactions, there will be a LOT of contraindications that your providers will have to go through. This drives them nuts. You can set this to not be quite so bad under Setup – Preferences – Chart Document – Drug Interactions. This helps but there are still bugs.
The Clinical Visit Summary is very long – the format is not the best and supplies the patient instructions at the end. Our organization found this to be a patient safety issue. GE is reformatting for 9.9. Also, we have shared charting so the CVS prints with the patient's home location instead of the specific location of the visit.
The providers are also going to probably have issue finding a problem. Educate them about the "Smart List".
We are very heavy into Meaningful Use. We're currently setting up CCDAs, Immunizations to the state, Transition of Care and VDT (View-Download-Transmit) using Qvera. We've also installed the CQR package.
GE SPRs (ie. Known Issues): 1. Data Mapping (new feature) 2. Too many problems – haven't determined the exact number but he provider will not be able to sign off on chart. 3. Extra screening tests on CPOE 4. Problem List – Onset date defaults to 1/1/60. 5. The Care Plan form is not displaying values in the dropdowns for Goals or Instructions. 6. Banner information may display code instead of info. Not a big deal since you can just go back into the chart but it's something you may notice. 7. Message- “The parameter is incorrect” when trying to sign off (or hold) on a chart note. Sporadic.
Hope this helps!
If you have specific I can help with, I can be reached at [email protected].
Posted : July 30, 2014 5:16 am
Topic starter
Thank you Jill ! Greatly appreciated. These are many of the issues we are seeing in test, and were wondering if they were fixed in production. I see you are on Service pack 3, and GE indicates that some of these might be fixed with version 4. Hope this is true.
Take care.
John
Posted : July 30, 2014 5:23 am
Sure thing!
We've not heard much about SP4. Mostly 9.9.
Posted : July 30, 2014 5:25 am
Topic starter
We were told today by our GE acct manager, that there will be SP4 out sometime next week, but not sure what it entails, or what issues it will address. Good luck !
Posted : July 30, 2014 5:28 am
I'm inquiring to our GE reps what SP4 entails. I'll post if I hear anything back.
Thanks! Jill
Posted : July 30, 2014 5:33 am
We are a neurosurgery practice, so we don't deal with immunizations and don't often have patients with us long enough for them to have inactive meds, so I can't comment on those issues.
In general, we have not had issues with slowness; 9.8 seems to be about the same speed as 9.5. We did have one morning on which things were very slow, but that turned out to be due to eRx formulary updates. Maybe we would have had that problem even if we had not upgraded. Nevertheless, we changed the eRx update schedule and have not had a problem since.
We have had occasional crashes in Citrix sessions--about 30 in a month--in which the application crashes with an access violation error. GE says that these crashes are due to a flaw in the EMR software. It also turns out that we had a few fat client users with power saver settings that caused their computers to go to sleep after a certain period of time. Upon their return, they had the same access violation error that occurs in Citrix. These users probably had those settings for awhile, but in 9.5 the application would say something like "Oracle has lost its connection to the database " and they would click on OK and log back in. In 9.8 they had to click on OK to the access violation error about 10 times, after which the final error would say "Out of memory." Because of this, we suspect that the Citrix problem is actually due to some session setting that we haven't figured out yet.
One important thing to take note of is that after completing the upgrade, you must log in to the EMR once before installing Knowledgebase updates. If you immediately attempt to install KB updates, you may end up with a failed upgrade and have to revert to backup. GE tells me that this is a known but undocumented problem.
Posted : July 30, 2014 6:20 am
To those of you that have upgraded to 9.8, how many providers do you have?
Posted : August 1, 2014 4:54 am
Topic starter
We are in the 35 to 40 provider range for our outpatient practices.
Posted : August 1, 2014 4:57 am
We have 30.
Posted : August 1, 2014 5:21 am
jmazurow said:
Mary,
Thanks for the reply. We are interested in knowing what issues remained after going live. We have had many issues with 9.8 in test, and have decided to postpone our upgrade this weekend, hoping that GE would fix many of the issues. They include inactive meds now showing as active in the Med list, Immunization form not working properly, slowness, crashing, drug interactions not working, etc.
If you could send me your email with some problems that you are experiencing, we would appreciate it.
My info is as follows:
John Mazurowski
315-624-5873
John, since we didn't go with 9.8 and went to CPS 11 from EMR 9.5, I can't speak specifically to a 9.8 experience, but even late this afternoon we took yet another trouble call about how a patient's safety was seriously put at risk, because his med list did not display fully on the Prescription form. It was our pediatric specialty clinic, where we have seriously ill children with complicated med lists, and not having them show up accurately is, in my perspective, unacceptable. Forget MU and insurance incentives - what about patient lives?
A co-worker and I tried to figure out a work-around, and by the end of the day we'd agreed to take to our patient safety and physician leadership and recommend removing the Prescription form from main office visits. We want to strongly encourage clinics to use the Update Medication window to review, add, remove, refill, and deactivate meds. Some clinics already do, but over the years several of our clinics had leaned heavily on the Prescription refill form for more than just refills. I don't know if considering a similar workflow change would be something for your clinics, but after the problems we've been having, and the safety risks posed by inaccurate displays of meds in GE's Prescription form, it is all I can think of for now.
Good luck!
Posted : August 1, 2014 11:32 am
