Podcast with Richard Yonis of AcerMed, Inc. "Clearing the Air"

I was contacted last week by Richard Yonis, Presdent of AcerMed, Inc. who wanted an opportunity put the record straight and "Clear the Air".

You can listen to our EMR interview here. 

If you have any follow-up comment or observations please reply under this thread.

Our other past interviews are available here at EMR Interviews. 

 

Some notes:

Litigation over the last 2 years was the financial drain, then the CTO took ill.
"Justice System to blame"
Ongoing Lawsuit Re: Medinformatix says AcerMed stole their code.
Acermed did pay a fine for "similar database tables" to Medinformatix.
The product (source code,C#.net platform.) is going "out for tender".
Skeleton staff at Acermed to wind things up.

 

Richard, if you are looking for new employment, you should consider becoming a politician or an attorney- because you are effective at blaming others and not taking any responsibility for your failure! You never admit that a non-working product and/or unprofessional and sub-standard support might have contributed to your demise.  Also, you did not mention the fact the courts had set for trial in March of 2008, with your company as a defendant, a lawsuit from a Florida MD- for breach of contract.

One of our customers bought the product over a year ago.  What does a lawsuit have to do with the fact that your delivered product never fully functioned?  Many features, such as faxing from the program, never worked.  This problem required all AcerMed docs to be first printed, faxed and then destroyed.  So much for workflow efficient and paper reducing features you are always hyping. Your company spent weeks blaming everyone else, before admitting something was wrong on your side.  AcerMed eventually gave up and never fixed it.

Because this was such an egregious issue, our company developed a work-around.  By the way, it was not hardware.  We exceeded or met your desired specifications in every category and in fact, your trainer told us- that we were the only installation she had ever been to without problems interfering with rollout or training.  We had and still do, the financial capacity to purchase whatever was required for optimal service levels.

AcerMed never delivered on a patient portal and the use of Twain devices was such that they would never release from use unless you re-started the program.  AcerMed always maintained it was a Microsoft issue not supporting multiple devices.  Yet, I write this on a machine with four Twain compliant devices attached, all acquiring and releasing without exiting the programs.

After paying for AcerMed to send in an employee to document needed changes- a subsequent upgrade overwrote all the changes.  First AcerMed denied it, and then you asked the physician if he would resend the changes.  Needless to say, he was not happy about loosing a day’s revenue to assist your employee and having to pay for your employee to do what your salesman had promised- only to have your company loose the changes and deny it.

Your service department would do upgrades with out telling us.  Even after repeated assurances that they would let us know of upgrades- they did not, or would not do it when scheduled.  Our company was willing to be available 24/7 to smooth out your problems from an overnight upgrade; yet not once did you cooperate, even after repeated assurances to your customer that you would.  Often, first use after an upgrade would create a host of problems.  Always, at least one workstation would be missed or would require a re-load.  Thus, usually at the beginning of the next day we would find a user not able to work and having to wait until 12:00 PM EST to reach you.  Generally, AcerMed never answered the phones before noon EST, despite the hype of an East Coast office you supposedly opened.    

One time a developer knocked out of the program, a physician in the middle of a day's production.  After informing your employee of such, he became indignant questioning why the physician was using it when he needed to be on it.

Richard Yonis you keep saying Asarum is such a great product.  However, many of our end-users would argue against that statement.  Asarum is cluttered with many screens that do not work or require a user to navigate hordes of irrelevant fields unnecessary for that particular office function.  Although, many offered improvement suggestions or keystroke reduction ideas for the user- your company was always arrogant and condescending in response.  After reviewing some with them, it was apparent that many would indeed improve the end-user experience and efficiency.

Your product and service is definitely among the worst of any vendor I have encountered in our company’s forty-year existence. 

Jeff Johnson PC Science Inc Clearwater, FL 

 

Ouch... I hate to be on either side of those problems.

I've visited their booth a while back and even took the time to travel to their corporate office in Irvine to see the application in action. I had my own reasons for not purchasing the software and in retrospect I'm glad I didn't.

Good move in not purchasing their product! 

 

Jeff Johnson PC Science Inc Clearwater FL

It is so comforting that we have a certification group that is making sure that software perform basic functions so things like this won't happen. Can you imagine if a certification group okayed a product like Acermed Asarum even though it had all these problems. It would probably make us all question the value of the certification process itself. I'm so glad that someone it watching out for us and not letting products like this one get certified and thrust onto unsuspecting doctors.

>>> It is so comforting that we have a certification group that is making sure that software perform basic functions so things like this won't happen. Can you imagine if a certification group okayed a product like Acermed Asarum even though it had all these problems. It would probably make us all question the value of the certification process itself. I'm so glad that someone it watching out for us and not letting products like this one get certified and thrust onto unsuspecting doctors.

Ahhh- AcerMed was CCHIT certified! This is one of many reasons why at emrupdate many of us have such a negative opinion on this particular certification process... it doesn't really "assure" anything, and actually leads to less competition, higher passed on certification costs, and promotion of more expensive, bloated software that makes the purchase of an EMR even riskier.

alborg:

Ahhh- AcerMed was CCHIT certified!  This is one of many reasons why at emrupdate many of us have such a negative opinion on this particular certification process... it doesn't really "assure" anything, and actually leads to less competition, higher passed on certification costs, and promotion of more expensive, bloated software that makes the purchase of an EMR even riskier.

I guess my sarcasm was too subtle

   I am a pediatrician with a high volume clinic in New Jersey.  I was on Acermed's Asarum product.  It did not work and seriously impacted our cash flow and ability to pay bills.

     I contacted Mediinformatix, who was responsive.  Given  our dire striates , Medinformatix sent out a rescue team to New Jersey.

     We converted to Medinformatix and on the first day we saw 80 patients in a paperless environment.  I had my best cash month in August on Medinformatix.  Medinformatix recognized my financial position and set up a payment plan.

Great post. 

I truly hope your comments help to alleviate some of the anxiety many others are feeling right now.  I've stated how similar the workflows are. As someone that has gone through the process, can you comment more from a users perspective on the similarities in the systems assisting in the ease of the transition?

     Acermeds Asarum and Medinformatix are very similar.  Without getting any formal instruction I was able to use Medinformatix software.  In fact my entire staff, from the billing dept., nurses, doctors and front desk had very little training on Medinformatix software.  Everyone loved the software and on the first day we were up and running.  The programs are very similar except Medinformatix actually works.   both systems uses Trees, the choices in the tress are very similar.   The choices in Medinformatix trees can be easily added to and changed.  Medinformatix RX works very well and new drugs can be added by the user.  Medinformatix also has other features that Asarum did not have.  I found it easy  to learn the new features.  I only had a half a day of training and I was ready to use the system full force.  I only wish I had bought Medinformatix first.

tfdierkes:

Without getting any formal instruction I was able to use Medinformatix software.  In fact my entire staff, from the billing dept., nurses, doctors and front desk had very little training on Medinformatix software.  Everyone loved the software and on the first day we were up and running. 

That's a nice quote that belongs on someone's website!

tfdierkes:

     Acermeds Asarum and Medinformatix are very similar.  Without getting any formal instruction I was able to use Medinformatix software.  In fact my entire staff, from the billing dept., nurses, doctors and front desk had very little training on Medinformatix software.  Everyone loved the software and on the first day we were up and running.  The programs are very similar except Medinformatix actually works.   both systems uses Trees, the choices in the tress are very similar.   The choices in Medinformatix trees can be easily added to and changed.  Medinformatix RX works very well and new drugs can be added by the user.  Medinformatix also has other features that Asarum did not have.  I found it easy  to learn the new features.  I only had a half a day of training and I was ready to use the system full force.  I only wish I had bought Medinformatix first.

Wait a minute.  I'm totally confused!  AcerMed rated #1 by ACGroup (Anderson) and Medinformatix rated near the bottom by ACGroup - and they are so similar.  Mr Anderson, would you care to enlighten us how you arrived at your ranking?  I understand you do a verification of vendor claims, so either you are a fraud or... there is some sort of aberration in the space-time continuum?  Maybe we should start advertising "e-MDs, lowest rated by ACGroup and proud of it! - we don't buy ratings, never have, never will" 

Also, I recall Cyath posted in the early days that eCW looked like a copy of e-MDs, and yet eCW was top rated and e-MDs was low rated.  It's amazing how products that seem so close get rated so far apart by this guy (not group mind you, but one spelling challenged individual).  Could it be that vendors that have had such a wonderful rating by Anderson are guilty by association?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Maybe someone from Medinformatix can let us know how much they spent on manderson's consulting fees ?

 

I am a former Acermed user as well.  I will likely switch to Medinformatix.  What are the other Acermed users going to do about their obligation to the bank for their lease/purchase?  Do we not have rights in such circumstances?  Basically, Acermed new they were going down when they signed me.  They told me that they had only two dissatisfied customers in their history.  I specifically asked them about anything which could jeopardize their future.  Their sales representative, who I'm sure knew that their Zepplin was going down, lied about everything.  They scammed me into this contract and now I have to either contend with Acermed or the largest bank in the world to get out of the obligation.  I'm not sure which is worse.  I want to talk to some other Acermed users about this.