Does This Site Suck?

OK, that's kinda harsh language but that's what being suggested by more than a few people. Yes, others feel like it's the greatest place but we can't ignore some of the complaints.

I think it would be great if we could get back to people doing demo's and then reporting on them. To Cyath's point, that really is the best way for visitors to learn about a particular EMR. In fact, I think it's the only way with regards to a forum.

Personally, I am ok with the political banter and have grown to like Al's photo's. However, I can see how people feel that we have become unbalanced with respect to what others come to this site to read about.

I don't think this site sucks, but we could do more along the lines of highlighting vendors. One idea would be to have some folks review an EMR/month and then have them independently write a review. I would be glad to do that.

Any vollunteers with regards to their EMR or their time to write reviews?

 Lowell

Having truly unbiased reviews of EMR's by physicians could go a long way to providing a good service to the lurkers of this site.  The only issue I see is that vendors are constantly changing, that is why many consultants are now letting vendors update there profile on-line, after all we continue to spend money on development every month, so obviously major changes happen all the time.

Take eMedRec for example, two months ago we had no Health Maintenance, now we have it in Beta Sites.  This month we have no enterprise scheduler, next month we will have a beta site using it.  The reviewer will need to know this and have a opportunity to post about this.  Same for EMR's that don't participate in this site.

We would be happy to setup our N-Tier solution with a reviewer like Lowel or Dr. Murdoch.  We would even make ourselves available to go over features and functions with them.  This would truly be important as many EMR's are based on many different concepts and workflows to solve business problems in a Medical Practice Environment.

Obviously we would be unwilling to do this with a third party that in one way or another has there own product.

I think it would help a lot.  It would truly add value.

I don't think the site sucks, I think it is repetitive and has lost value because of this.

 

I've wanted to do this for a while, but have just run out of time with a number of projects I'm working on.

You are right that vendors change which is why you should post a nice disclaimer at the top that states that this review was done on version X.X.X and that the EMR may have done enhancements since this review that would have changed the review.  Please check with the EMR software company to find out revisions that have been done to improve their product. 

Or simply if one company is innovating at a very rapid pace, have only the new features reviewed.  How long can it take to review one feature, it takes months to develop good ones.

Back in the good old days about 4 or 5 years ago it seemed to be alot more informative. Doctors were posting alot more questions back then and everyone would pitch in to help each other out.  Today it seems like the board is dominated by a select few. Some of them provide a balanced and interesting viewpoint on various topics. Others are broken records repeating themselves over and over again.  I suspect new readers are afraid to post now for fear of ridicule or simply because they find the site to no longer be an unbiased and informative resource. To me it has definitely strayed from Kirk's original vision.  In the past year or so people have really been gravitating more towards the drama then the substance, slowly turning this place into a worthless knitting circle. 

DrQuit:

I don't think this site sucks, but we could do more along the lines of highlighting vendors. One idea would be to have some folks review an EMR/month and then have them independently write a review. I would be glad to do that.

Lowell, very few doctors are qualified to write a review of an EMR. But you are. If you remember, when I worked as a consultant for DoctorsPartner EMR/PM, Naveen did a remote demo for you, after which you wrote an excellent review on the product.

I believe your reviews of EMRs are the best things we ever published in EMR Update. I don't see how we could possibly give readers anything more valuable than a regular supply of your EMR reviews.

Right now, if you Google "EMR Interviews", my name comes up.

When someone Googles "EMR Reviews", they should get you. No one else is doing this vital EMR reviewing job. By all means, take the spotlight as the true EMR guru and thought leader that you are. No one else can do this except you.

The beauty of this industry is that here's a ton of great software to choose from. In a way, everyone has copied ideas from one another, but it has only helped to make the offering of products better overall. Having said that, products still range from poor to fantastic, and prices range from free downloads to extremely expensive. It's no different than any other segment of the software industry. As members of emrupdate, we need to be the physicians Consumer Reports of EMR, largely because we have the unique ability to understand the software from a technical and clinical perspective. It's fair to report on that aspect and then list the price so people can judge if a product warrants the price or not.

The quality of the site has gone down over the years as the amount of talk about CCHIT/CCR/etc has grown and the amount of talk about EMRs has decreased.  Also there are a vocal few that are against for profit EMRs that I believe scare away the newbies who have questions about specific for profit EMRs.  The bashing of certain products (Praxis, Misys, etc) is also counterproductive, although warning potential buyers of the poor showing of certain companies in surveys is ok by me.  Bashing of certain unethical companies like Dr. Notes is also ok in my book. 

I think if you actually use a particular EMR you can bash it all you want. Otherwise you may want to reserve judgement or at least qualify your opinion based on your experience with it either via demos, through peers, etc.  For example even though I am a competitor I find the functionality of the Misys EMR to be quite respectable.  It is the usability that seems to suffer. Usability is of course based on the individual and what is intuitive to one person may not be intuitive to another. My assessment is based on online demos and live demos provided at shows such as TEPR, etc.

As a long time lurker, I felt drawn to post on this subject.

I haven't found much help for Ophthalmology here but I expect to as the percentage of  eye practices using EMR technology rises above 10%.

EMR update needs subforums, better sticky topics, and to be relevant to EMR/EHR vendors touting products as well as MDs (and the IT people that work for them) trying to get peer review on major investments. We've spent over $200,000 on medical equipment over the last two years, but are quite hesitant to invest similarly in EMR/EHR technology as the direct patient and financial benefits are not as clear.

I wish some of the common players in our field, CompuLink, Penn Medical, etc, would come to a place like this to answer questions and promote publically like Brendan Holt and others do (where their peers and MDs respond). I would much rather invest with one of their companies, as I can see their plan and get an idea of how they cope with an ever changing market. The first company I mentioned is widely used (3500 installations, 800 ophthalmology) but is a total black hole and, well, leaves much to be desired from a user perspective (4+ years). The second has more a more elegant EMR experience, but I haven't seen it making a significant dent in the market. They both need peer review from a site like this, and perhaps better organization of the site's data would help appeal to medical admins, docs, and vendors.

Thanks for reading... Just my $0.02.

PS: Your enhanced comment script completely froze firefox 2.0 when I had just about finished my post, and I had to rewrite what I could remember in IE6 to post. That part of the site totally sucks.

Yeah, I bash my EMR amazingcharts all the time, but it continues to improve so I stick with it.....

Until I can come up with another EMR that will transfer all the data from my current EMR and buy an EMR that is not absurdly expensive and will do everything in my dream list without using an ASP format, then amazingcharts it is. 

 I am referring other docs to this site to obtain feedback on possible purchase of an EMR, so the site's value cannot be overestimated.

The value that doctors can bring to this site cannot be underestimated. I think that the techie nerds like us see the software from a different perspective than some of our peers.

I have and still use PenChart software, but my group is migrating to a larger vendor. The docs on the EMR commitee in our group looked at every aspect of the EMR to see if it's a suitable for our group, and we used the IT dept extensively to help with the technical aspects that were over our heads.

A month or so ago, we decided to formally demo the product to our big group meeting (maybe 75 docs in attendance). We did a patient scenario to highlight the features and benefits. I did the demo along with some IT staff.

Wanna know what the questions were that the docs had? They didn't want to know about the note structure or Rx writer, or the HM module. They wanted to know what that little button is "greyed out" on the screen, and why the screen looks so busy and why can't the computer just order the lipids automatically for 3 months when you Rx a statin in the Rx writer. No one gives a crap about the underlying architecture of the product or not even the price for that matter. All they care about is functionality at the point of care. "Will this work for me?" is the bottom line when it comes to eval EMR's for the average doctor.

Fortunately for us, that's a question we can answer. And it's what I think lurkers want to know about the EMR's listed (or not listed) on this site.

>All they care about is functionality at the point of care. "Will this work for me?"

Agreed. I handle the tech end, but also am responsible for a thorough review of usability. Nobody here is interested in technology that isn't done well. Case in point: One MD detests his windows desktop, and doesn't much enjoy using ms office. Another is comfortable with windows, and common office programs. Yet another is more savvy and sometimes I get his take on involved IT issues. Of those three, all really enjoy their Palm Treo 700p mobile devices. Why? Interface and usability. One does all their online work from it solely (the first MD obviously).

emrupdate.com needs to be a magnet, as another has said, a "Consumer Reports" for MDs interested in this technology. A way to decide which company is going to invest your support money to your advantage rather than maybe providing an update every year or two (!).

Topics such as P4P and CCHIT still have their place, as Medicare controls about 2/3rds of our practice population. What the government requires we will end up doing.

PS: The plaintext & standard content editors work well with firefox 2.0.

Does this site suck?  No, but it needs some buffing.  Like everything else in life worth doing, you need some goals.  Right now those goals are shrouded in fog.  I appreciated the older days (of 2 yrs ago) when there was more discussion about features to improve workflow, talk about interface issues, debates on granularity, questions about health maintenance and the role of the EMR, and many other topics.  It seems that the contributors to EMRUpdate now resort to the easy "All EMRs have that".....end of discussion, when in fact that is not the case.  We had one frequent contributor expounding on the virtues of an EMR he neither bought nor used.

Well, all EMRs are not alike and hopefully the readers of EMRUpdate are here to find reviews from experienced EMR users, to review the merits and pittfalls of different brands, and freely interject questions into threads.  If someone is harsh in their review of one product, then the vendor or user can refute it, if appropriate.

The first step is to decide what EMRUpdate is about. Hopefully, it will become the first stop for biased information (biased by users of the product!, whether positive or negative).  I believe that readers want to hear from users and users are biased.

 

 Many of you complain way too much... If you don't like the substance, then begin a thread about what you do care about. If you don't like the site, then WHY ARE YOU HERE??? If someone disagrees with your point of view, then don't attack him/her. Take a breather and discuss the topic at hand, and why you disagree. Alternatively, you can ignore such threads. If you are the timid sort and feel too shy to post, then don't complain. Go see your psychiatrist.

This website is here for everyone. If we all thought/posted alike, then nothing really of value would be obtained and the site would slowly die off. Discussions s.a. Jet 4 vs SQL that Matt and I have had are classic. Many discussions that I've had with Cyath about free/cheap vs. expensive EMRs also I feel have been fruitful endeavors. To label this site as "suck" simply because posters are discussing things that you are not interested in is really mean spirited and really is an affront to those posters which do generate a lot of traffic for the site. It also is demeaning to Nick who has worked so hard to make this site what it is today.

>>> The quality of the site has gone down over the years as the amount of talk about CCHIT/CCR/etc has grown and the amount of talk about EMRs has decreased. 

Again, "beauty is in the eyes of the beholder". Since the discussions of CCHIT have taken off, the growth in postings, visits, and new members have skyrocketed, compared to earlier in the summer when numbers across the board were decreasing. I've asked Nick to post these numbers last week, and I'm sure that he will when he gets back from the beach. On any given moment, I've seen up to 90 148 (update- tonight!) simultaneous lurkers on the site. You now have Medical Economics visiting and asking us questions about future articles, Mark Anderson from TERP fame addicted and visiting frequently, and most CEOs of significant EMRs chiming in when their products are discussed.

CCHIT is a very popular topic only because many of us feel that it is a very critical, negative development inside the HIT industry. Many of you may disagree, but I ask you then to ignore these posts in favor of those posts that you do like.

>>> Also there are a vocal few that are against for profit EMRs that I believe scare away the newbies who have questions about specific for profit EMRs.

I don't think that anyone here is against "profit" per se. It's the degree of gouging that occasionally occurs inside this relatively new HIT industry which needs further discussion. Most physicians are not tech saavy and can be taken for an ugly financial ride. I personally find that a tough situation to swallow.

emrupdate.com is a free site- those that can't stand the heat, then shouldn't post, although I too wish that they did. It's like driving a car- once you get going, then it becomes easier. Nobody is going to rip into you nor will you be ridiculed, no matter how many mistakes or off the wall you may seem.

In other sites where loud-mouthed fear-mongerers like myself can't be found, the site traffic is almost dead. Check out docsboard.com, emrupdate's main competitor, where the last post, on an "Acermed" discussion was on 11/18/2006. Heck, if I didn't post there, it would be even slower. Similar smaller sites abound... you can reply to a post and possibly get an answer in 2-4 weeks.

BTW- my thread "Al's OpenSource EMR" is the #2 EMR related thread at http://docsboard.com/ with 4321 views, second only to a stickied thread, "Follow Up Patients Without EMR".

>>> I don't think this site sucks, but we could do more along the lines of highlighting vendors. One idea would be to have some folks review an EMR/month and then have them independently write a review. I would be glad to do that.

(Gulp- taking my Valium ) I very much agree... with Cyath's excellent statement: "It's fair to report on that aspect and then list the price so people can judge if a product warrants the price or not." The one thing that would be of help that is not reported in most vendor websites and is critical in an EMR decision is COST. You should bring that up in your reviews, Lowell.

>>> I am ok with the political banter and have grown to like Al's photo's.

Aw shucks... another convert.