Thanks for the input. The purpose of the price increase is to do just what you are saying - increase the Help Desk and the development team to be able to speed up the time to resolution for any support issues, and be able to add the new features no matter what new requirements are introduced.
For example, PM was significantly delayed as we had to develop a more usable ePrescribing, get CCHIT certified, etc. Now we have to get a whole new certification required by the government and add new features and reports to satisfy meaningful use legislation. But this is just the nature of the EHR industry, and I know that all EHRs are struggling with the same issues.
The price increase is being instituted just for this purpose - to allow us to hire the additional people needed to support our growing client base (>3500 unique practices) and successfully complete parallel development projects in a timely fashion.
I agree that there is certainly room for improvement regarding these issues, but many users who have come to us from other systems to Amazing Charts have reported these same type of issues (
other users, feel free to chime in here with your prior EHR experiences) - and those other EHRs charge significantly more for their product. Here are some of their published 1 Physician 5 Year Client-Server Projected Costs presented by the Maryland Health Care Commission (see link above):
- Allscripts EHR costs $53,483 for a solo physician and $6,034/year thereafter.
- eClinicalWorks EHR costs $18,150 for a solo physician and $2,400/year thereafter.
- e-MDs EHR costs $16,332 for a solo physician and $3,442/year thereafter.
- GE's EHR costs $36,000 for a solo physician and $4,000/year thereafter.
- Greenway EHR costs $51,626 for a solo physician and $7,884/year thereafter.
- McKesson EHR costs $27,857 for a solo physician and $1,800/year thereafter.
- NextGen EHR costs $11,150 for a solo physician and $9,900/year thereafter.
My point here is not to deflect your valid concerns, but rather to put these concerns into perspective, as I firmly believe that Amazing Charts provides a much more usable product with generally terrific support, at a price many thousands of dollars less than the competition.
- Amazing Charts EHR: $1,995 for a solo physician and $995/year thereafter.
In other words, our pricing is literally 1/2 to 1/10th the price of other EHRs - and I doubt that anybody would say our support and development cycle is 1/2 to 1/10th the level of these others. In fact, according to FPM's 2009 EHR user survey study of >2000 docs using EHRs, the AAFP's Center for Health IT ongoing survey of EHR users, and Medscape's most recent EHR User's survey, our support is actually better than nearly all other EHRs on the market (FYI: e-MDs training and support was rated slightly better than ours, but look at the price difference), and our customer satisfaction in all these studies was rated higher than everybody else.
