Alteer Going Under???

Sure was nice being down for 1.5 hours yesterday in the middle of the day. So much for redundent ISP's. When I got the simultaneous call from 4 clients telling me their Alteer was down I thought we may have arrived at D-Day. Fortunately it was just an ISP issue.

Nick

We've had Alteer since 2001 and have liked it, for the most part. Unfortunately, the service has gotten horrible and the updates have been few and far between. We received a letter recently inviting us to a users' meeting in CA, and a second letter indicating the company is making an effort to become more "service oriented" and that it is coming out with a major upgrade. The company also has 10,000 installed users. While this is no guarantee the company is about to fold, it's plainly in danger of dwindling away if it doesn't improve service dramatically and make some substantial improvements in the program.

Maybe it's just me, but if Alteer is having a user's meeting, you would think they would have updated their website to indicate such an event. I am not disputing that there is a meeting, but it just seems fishy to me that their website has not been updated since earlier this year.

In addition, in light of the "publicity" that this forum has created for Alteer, do you think they would have addressed that on their website also? From my early days in healthcare working for an HMO that eventually filed bankruptcy, we would see press release after press release issued by our company that all was well despite negative stories that the media and other sources were reporting. To my knowledge, there has not been a peep out of Alteer.

I guess they believe in the old saying: "No news is good news". Who knows.

Alteer was done in Utah for 2.5 hours last week and as far as trouble tickets...I have one open for 3 wks with no resolution.

We have Alteer in two centers and we have been pretty much down going on three days now, they have moved out two centers to a seperate server to debug but no progress has been made in three days, out patient flow is gone, cant edit encounter, no document routing. Has anyone else experinced this problem any help would be great or comments.

Bryan Mcafee
Systems Administrator (unless they fire me after this)
bryanmcafee@a-o-centers.com
956-664-1400
956-227-8128

Three days...talk about a China syndrome for EMR...ouch!

For what it is worth, the Alteer website has finally been updated. One of the things I have noticed that are missing from the prior version of their website are the practice testimonials and calendar of events, which had not been updated since the beginning of the year. But it does list management (which was there before but not updated if I recall correctly), and their various investors, which I did not recall seeing previously.

There is one other thing missing from this website: screenshots of the product itself. I don't know how you all feel, but words on a screen telling me how great a product is without a visual just doesn't cut it for me.

Does anyone know about how much Alteer charges to just cancel with them and get your data stored locally? I have been getting the runaround trying to get a answer from them.

Bryan Mcafee
Systems Administrator
bryanmcafee@a-o-centers.com
956-227-8218

I got a statement of work for 10k to move to a local server model.

If you just want a copy of the data, they'll give you a read only format for 5k which includes a "Alteer Viewer." Unfortunately you still cannot extract data from that.

Nick

Has anyone had any luck in converting from Alteer Viewer to another software package electronically {ie: importing the data to the new program}

thanks in advance

I really think at this point the only viable option is either faxing entire charts from Alteer to the new one internally, or printing to PDF files and then just importing those into your new system.

Nick

If anyone is having problems with Alteer, this is a good thread.

A little info on Alteer

Irvine, CA - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - Alteer Corporation, a company focused on providing business solutions to medical practices, completed the first of two closings in a transaction that added $16.5 Million to the capitalization of the Company. Alteer delivers technology-enabled solutions that increase practice profitability and optimize workflow to small and mid-sized physician practices across the United States.

MedVenture Associates and existing investor Sanderling Ventures are co-leading the round, and are joined by existing investor Skyline Ventures. Triple Tree, LLC advised the Company on the transaction.

“This new funding allows Alteer to move forward quickly on expanding sales and marketing initiatives and infrastructure enhancements, and is optimal timing to accelerate Alteer’s growth to meet increasing market demands for our medical practice workflow solutions,” said Gene Barduson, Alteer Corporation CEO today.

We'll it's 2012 and from my experience thus far during this past month, things seem to be the same as what's reflected in the posts from back in 2003/2004.

We're an EHR VAR and a practice has asked us to convert their data. This was our first conversion from this vendor so we started to investigate, and the practice has no data on their server, it's $5k for a data viewer, $10k for data extraction and the vendor can't answer the question of who owns the data.

In addition, the contract the practice has with the vendor is not for a hosted configuration, so the data should be on their server, but it's not.

If anyone in this thread has ideas or would like to talk with me offline, please let me know. We're trying to help the practice out of a bad situation.

I have been an employee at CompuGroup Medical (Alteer) for the past two months and I really hate it, and I’m currently looking for a new job.

I can tell you without a doubt that Alteer won’t be around for much longer. I am really amazed that we still exist now. Our datacenter servers are extremely old, failing, always going down, and loosing data, and I always have to deal with them. The Alteer software is extremely old. We even finally released version 8.0 and it is basically the same as 7.1, just some added features. Not only do we not have software that will run on modern hardware, but this software isn’t even compatible with normal computers of today.

Sorry, I can rant about this all day, but if I knew what I was getting in to, I would have never taken this job.

If I were you, I would start weaning yourself off of Alteer and move to a different, modern, reliable system, as Alteer’s days are numbered. I come to work and I feel like I have traveled back in time to the 1990’s. But when I go to my personal physician’s office, I feel like I’m in the future. My doctor uses DrChrono which uses modern hardware like the iPad with beautiful, intuitive software. My doctor loves it so much, he is always showing me great things on it. It is a great experience for both the practice and the patient. I highly recommend a solution like this, anything but Alteer which everyone hates, being anchored to a huge old desktop computer opposed to using a beautiful tablet.

Everyone is incompetent here. They won’t upgrade the datacenter servers, they won’t upgrade Alteer to a level from ten years ago, we can’t get the government incentives program going, and no one knows what they are doing. They all just try to get through today on a day to day basis. God I hate it here. Worst company I have ever seen.

But it makes sense that CompuGroup Medical doesn’t do any upgrades. Why sink money into a failing company. They are a sinking ship and as soon as they start losing money, they are going to go out of business and screw all of their customers yet again. Just wait, watch and see. It will happen sooner than you think.