Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Pre-Purchase Questions

Fair enough, and frankly I'm posting here (and check out my other post from today) out of frustration - breaking my first rule of not responding when frustrated (of course I break that rule all the time).

I certainly understand that when an issue comes up day after day in practice, and you can clearly see a solution that would solve it, you can barely wait to see it instituted. That is literally why I started Amazing Charts in the first place. I knew what needed to be done, and how the solution would so easily and wonderfully work for my practice. It did. But as soon as I solved one issue, I realized three more that could also make my life easier.

I guess what has happened since is that we’ve grown to the point that there are literally thousands of requests from users and they take time to implement. Worse still, we need to implement other requirements that are out of our control. CCHIT is a good example of these requirements. Painful, fraught with detrimental and complex programming requirements, and not something the majority of our users (me included) believed mattered. But despite this, it became evident to us from hearing from small numbers of practices across the country that their local insurers were using CCHIT certification as an excuse to lower reimbursements. (Since a small minority of practices were using an EHR - let alone a CCHIT certified EHR - payors said they would reimburse higher amounts to those practices using a CCHIT certified system.)

So even though this meant stopping development on other requested features, we decided that we had to get this done. The same thing is going to happen as PCMH and meaningful use gets defined. We’ll have to stop what we are developing – the tons of features our users clearly can see will help them get through the day – to put in place the tools so they will be able to get reimbursed more.

And unfortunately, throwing programmers at the problem doesn’t work (I’ve tried this). Having a feature doesn’t make it usable – look at eCW’s 30+ clicks to document a flu shot, or, in fairness, our own V4 e-Prescribing that I find to be essentially unusable. It is the integration of the feature with the rest of the system without requiring extra clicks and navigation of menus and windows that is the difference between something that is usable and something that slows you down and is frustrating. And making something really usable is the most difficult and time consuming part of my job. (Well, actually, dealing with clients that complain is worse.)

So I apologize if my frustration overshadows the fact that I truly do agree with what you are saying. Amazing Charts will get to where it needs to be. It is taking time, and although I am exploring options that, in theory, could get us there faster, for example by selling a stake in the company to raise enough cash to bring in a larger development team, I fear that this path will actually lead to a less usable and more expensive product (having shareholders means you have to answer to them). I base this on the fact that there are many more expensive EHRs that are already much less usable (according to user satisfaction surveys discussed above and in my other post from today). Many of these vendors have essentially unlimited money behind them (e.g., GE’s Centricity, Allscripts, NextGen, etc.) So I am not confident that just having a larger development team means that the added features will actually be usable.


I guess the question is, can you wait and trust that we’ll get there on our own? Does Amazing Charts do 90% or more of what you need to get done? And are you able to wait for us to add the rest? But Jack, I think you may have hit the nail on the head. Perhaps the real issue is that we’ve not clearly communicated our development plans – or provided information when these plans change. That is something we can and will immediately solve.

Jon