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So, I told myself I wasn’t going to do this, I didn’t want to be THAT person. But we all have a breaking point and I have discover that months and months of an unresolved issue as led me to be, THAT person. I am hoping that you understand though, as you are also a devout GE Healthcare CPS user. Do you know what the bugger of it is though? If at one point in the last few months someone had said sorry, or any of the sort, it would have made things a little better. Acknowledging to someone that what has been done to them is wrong, and that they are sorry no matter where the fault lies, is part of being good, being a good company. Is that not what we strive for, doing good, being good?
This is only PART of my never ending, let’s call them endeavors, with GE. I will keep this mostly clean, as I am passed the point that my more vulgar and quite frequently used vocabulary will be used. I will admit on several occasions I had some very choice words. But we’ll leave that to another day. Also keep in mind, if I had included the correspondence and SR’s that I have had to open with GE, it would be quite extensive, you probably don’t have the time, and you probably don’t care much, but you’re reading this, so. Here goes….
We updated to CPS 12 July 2 2014 and have had nothing but issues, and that is putting it MILDLY. We had over 45 SRs within the first 8 months of updating. Customer service has been terrible, rude, and unreliable. Not sure what monkey farm produced the operators, or whatever they may be, defiantly not a “tech”, but after spending an ungodly amount of time trying to tell them the issue, and them not fully understanding, they blame you then shove you on a different monkey. Okay, so 1) Techy people have a language all their own. (I speak that language, wouldn’t one think communicating in the same language would be simple?) So getting them to understand the issue is difficult at best. 2) Let me be perfectly clear it IS an issue on their end. Always.
Finally you get a tech on the line, try explaining again, and….they don’t know, and will need to call you back. Great. Once they “fix” the problem you will never get an apology or any sort of ownership of their mistake. Then again you probably talked to, I don’t know 3 maybe 4 different people. But hey, the issue is resolved (back pat for GE), it doesn’t matter that they speak to you like you haven’t gotten a clue how to even put your socks on in the morning. One foot at a time fellas, just like you.
Each SP that is released has bugs, EVERY. ONE! And fine, all software has bugs and each time they are released they get better. You hear that GE you’re supposed to get better with each release! tap. tap. tap. Is this thing on?
I have heard….. that they don’t even test the updates before they roll out (collective gasps) as they are rolling out so often that they do not have the time to test. I know what you’re thinking, “How can they do that, how can they possibly release an update without testing it?” Its simple really, they don’t have to. They don’t have to make sure what they release to the ton even actually works, this wonderfully mastered software. This is supposed to help you manage the CARE OF YOUR PATIENTS. People really, why do we stand for it?? I have an answer to that, of course I do right. WE HAVE TO. That’s it, we have to. Because if you’re a small clinic like us, 3 providers, we would literally go out of business. We simply cannot afford to change our EHR, we would be financially ruined. Sorry kiddies the doctor you saw when you were a wee little babe, the one that you now bring your babes to has been shut down, closed, gone dark, folded. You get it.
I wonder sometimes, if we were a larger facility, would we get the attention we needed? Would we have to worry everyday what kind of problems will present themselves? Would we have to fight tooth and nail to get an issue resolved?
I have ranted and raved enough, you’re probably asking yourself what happen to make this poor person break. Okay, so quickly, quicklyish anyway, since June 2 we have not been able to print most (like really important ones) financial reports, view or save them. We opened a SR on June 2, it was closed Aug 8. We talked with a rep, we will keep names out of this for the sole reason that I do not think that anything at all will come of name dropping, we found work around, ah the infamous work around, which turned out to not “work around” and left it at that.
And this is probably unbelievably, my fault. I did not state to the tech, continue working on the issues that was not resolved, to let me know once they found the issue. I am undeniably at fault for not expressing that I wish the issue to be resolved. But to my displeasure, when I check the status on SSO it was closed. CLOSED. No one called for two whole months, no one bothered to follow up. They closed the SR. JUST. LIKE. THAT. Closed. Now I cannot say was shocked, remember over 45 SR’s. I’ve seen all, experienced all. I was not shocked. I. WAS. OUTRAGED. Our sales rep was finally involved, little good that did. She escalated the SR to a “support manager” who was supposed to get back to me later that day. That was three weeks ago. Now understand, I did not give up. I called GE every week, up until our rep was involved. I was told all techs were busy and I would get a call back. Bet you can guess what happened, go ahead, I’ll wait…...RIGHT! I did not get a call back. I stared wondering what if it’s me. Nah.
I have called on her, our sales rep, a couple of times since, and get the same response “I’ll look into it”. So now it’s been three weeks, since she said she would get the ball rolling, again. WE STILL CANNOT PRINT REPORTS! REPORTS people, the reports that a business office would rely on! What kind poppycock and all around general duckery (yes duckery) is going on over there!! And how is it ethical?
So I am begging you, please, if you are not vested too deeply into GE, get out!! Get out now, before it’s too late. Once they have the claws in they will bleed you dry and leave you a shriveled shivering husk, they own you. Well done GE. Well done. We cannot save ourselves, but if we can save you from the money mongers that claim to “power, move & cure the world”, and are “changing the world one idea at a time” it’s my duty to try. Just remember that they are “curing the world” your world, your patients!
Posted : September 15, 2015 9:31 am
I feel for you man.
We are a medium practice with 60+ Physicians.
and we get the same treatment or worse.
Posted : September 15, 2015 10:31 am
I'm glad we aren't the only ones experiencing something like this. We have been customers of GE since 2005. 10 years. When we need support it is never there. You have to call and call and call and email and call. Our Sales Rep is a joke. He never answers his phone so we leave voicemails. Those are never responded to. We send him emails. No response.
About a month ago GE closed one of our SRs so I got a survey email and I let them have it. At the end of the survey I requested a call back and got one within 8 minutes of submitting my survey response. I was shocked to say the least. The Call Center Manager goes on to tell me about all of the great and exciting changes they have made in the past few months to the Call Center and expected me to be impressed.
Here are some of the things I ranted about to her for close to an hour:
Long Hold Times - Sometimes upwards of 30 minutes, then you get a voicemail, leave a voicemail and never get a call back.
An SR was open for 19 days, the rep finally called me back after following up with him almost every single day for 19 days. He unchecked one box in CPS and called it good. He couldn't explain what the issue was or what that check box did but that fixed our issue. No apology, no call back with an explanation, nothing. Great.
The GE shoulder shrug - Never knowing what's going on with our tickets. No communication. No follow up. Just a "We'll get back to you when we feel like it" attitude.
Our account manager - I submitted a "Formal Complaint" to some manager somewhere about our account manager. Never got a call back or any sort of follow up regarding the situation. Heck, I even asked for our account to be reassigned to someone competent and someone that will actually speak to us.
Billing issues - We get a statement every month with a ton of charges on it that we have no idea what they are. There is no explanation and I was told a billing manager would be in contact with us to go over each item one by one. Do you think we ever got a call? No.
THEN, we do our CPS 12 upgrade. Flawless. Or so we thought. I come in the next morning after a 12 hour upgrade and spend another 7 hours uninstalling and reinstalling our EMR software that broke because of the upgrade. GE had no idea this would happen. You couldn't even open the EMR without an error message. Again, they had no idea how to fix it and they had nothing to say about it besides that it looked like a virus because they "Googled" it. Thanks GE.
We are fed up with EVERYTHING having to do with them. We are in the same boat, we would switch but it isn't worth it financially. We still have 8 open SRs that have been open mostly since April. When I complain about not getting a response I get the following response from GE: "Our current back log is large and we are prioritizing by Priority and Patient Safety. "
My main question is why isn't GE doing something about this? If they know they have a bad product why aren't you looking at your developers and hiring competent engineers. Why aren't you looking at your phone hold times and hiring more people? People that actually know what they are doing. This company is a nightmare. Stay away.
Posted : September 15, 2015 10:32 am
This topic hits home for me because I was hired to be the EHR Tech. I was hired at a very low rate of pay for someone in IT because that was what the job indexes were saying about the pay range for an EHR Tech (someone who puts in new users and answers questions). Well. I was here for about 3 months when I decided I needed a second IT degree to be able to support this system. Not a first IT degree ... a second one, and I began to argue for a raise. I argued with HR that they truly did not understand what it really takes to support CPS. I said it often and loud. While other systems provide registries, gap reporting, closed loop referral tracking, specialty templates, interfaces, integrated secure messaging, reliable immunization management, reliable protocols, reporting engines, dashboards...etc, this system does not. I have to invent it. Like build it from scratch using any tool I can muster.
I often report an issue and have it solved or have built a work around before the tech even gets back to me. I sincerely hope the techs are not claiming those solutions as their own...
Posted : September 15, 2015 11:10 am
Understood, we deal with this all the time. A lot of the time we here have to work together to get answers, if any, or we build custom work-arounds because so much money has been invested in this software.
Also, would like to hear some of the issues you are having that were not resolved.
Posted : September 15, 2015 11:12 am
Acantu, Don't open that can. Is not worms that will come out.
but Gigantic Dinosaur Piranhas, and lot of them "lots".
Posted : September 15, 2015 11:29 am
toehme, I think we're all in agreement here that we've all had the same kinds of issues with support. None of us here work for GE, but I think some of us would like to try and do what we can to give advice on helping. When you talk about printing issues, what do you mean by that? Do you get errors when you print, or you push print and nothing happens? It sounds like you have more issues than just this, but maybe some of us have had the same issues and can provide you some guidance.
Posted : September 15, 2015 12:33 pm
I agree about getting help from the group. Even GE's own user community has solutions posted that, somehow, nobody at GE can give you when you submit a service request.
My co-worker and I both had the same experience of hiring on with the idea that supporting this application would be similar to supporting the many other applications we've dealt with in our extensive IT histories. WRONG! This Centricity thing is a beast unlike any other. We are so often tempted to take a break from constantly putting out Centricity fires and find another EMR. Any feedback on that one?
Posted : September 16, 2015 5:20 am
We very much feel your pain - 18 docs and 18 midlevels/therapists - it's a horrible feeling in IT to have the largest headache of your practice be nothing you can do anything about. We're in the process now of discussing changing EMRs in the next 18 months after being with GE since spring 2010.
Posted : September 16, 2015 8:31 am
This seemed like some timely news. So, I thought I would share:
Posted : September 16, 2015 9:19 am
uh oh....... good link!
Posted : September 16, 2015 10:18 am
Hi Trish,
I appreciate your candid feedback. As the leader for CPS-CEMR customer support, it’s important that I have a pulse on our customer experiences, so I genuinely appreciate that people like yourself actively provide this.
Regarding your specific issues, I know that Aaron and Wes have been working directly with Netgain on your printing issue, and have provided a detailed resolution for this. Clearly there has been some disconnect with you not receiving the information we’ve provided them, so I’ve reached out directly to you and Greg at Netgain late yesterday to work through this directly, together. I apologize that this issue was not handled adequately up to this point, and will be working with my team on ways we can improve 3rd party engagement for these kinds of issues.
Regarding your history of support experience with GE, I want to first say- I understand your frustration. I’ve also reviewed your support history, and although many of your cases have been closed within 3 days of contact, several have taken much longer (over 30 days) to resolve. We have had –and do have- challenges, but we are investing a lot of resources to make significant improvements. In August, we rolled out an improved support model, with a frontline Primary Support Team staffed with strong cross-product technical capabilities and able to handle and resolve the broadest set of issues possible on or very close to the first customer contact. Beyond this team, we have our specialized depth technical teams, staffed with highly skilled and capable support analysts. And, beyond these, we’ve added a Support Engineering team who are skilled at an engineering level, capable of root-cause DBA, scripting and bug root-cause analysis in tandem with our product engineering teams. I am proud to be working with all of these teams, they are absolutely technical and product experts who work tirelessly every day (and on weekends for critical issues) dedicated to providing effective support for our customers and solving customer issues. As you may know, we also survey customers for satisfaction on every issue we resolve, and the teams take every one of these surveys as valuable feedback- they review the score and the comments to create needed changes in process and issue handling directly from them. We know that we’re not yet where we want to be- and where you need us to be- but I want to assure we come to work every single day to focus on making the changes needed to get there. You should already be seeing improvements from these changes we’ve made in the past few months, with more being brought online going forward.
I know exceptions will occur- such as yours- and when they do, we want to recover these as quickly and effectively as possible. Anytime you feel that an issue is not getting the right attention or traction, I encourage you to request a Supervisor or Team Manager to assist. The Support Analyst, Supervisor and Manager are the closest to your issue from a technical and status standpoint and can quickly intervene to correct breakdowns that may be occurring. In addition, I’ve asked my Team Managers to engage me directly either at the request of a customer, or if a critical customer issue requires higher level intervention from support, engineering, product or other Centricity teams. I often worked directly with customers to help facilitate many such issues, and will continue doing so whenever required.
Thank you again. I’m looking forward to working with you directly on your immediate issue, and in the future please don’t hesitate to reach out to myself or my managers directly.
Rob
Robert Armstrong | CPS-CEMR Client Support Leader
GE Healthcare IT Customer Center | [email protected]
Posted : September 16, 2015 10:52 am
It appears we all need to publish a fed up post in order to receive a response like the one above. Even after multiple emails and calls to supervisors for my company to GE we still have outstanding issues that never get worked. I know I am not alone when saying this either.
Posted : September 16, 2015 11:05 am
Topic starter
Have posts been disappearing??
Posted : September 18, 2015 4:56 am
Yeah they are. Yesterday there were 15 replies, now it's at 12.
I think my favorite part of the GE customer experience is tickets being closed with no resolution at all and the final update being "no contact" and then receiving a survey to fill out about our experience. I sent multiple direct emails to the name on the ticket with no response and now the ticket has been closed with no resolution.
Posted : September 18, 2015 5:22 am
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