Wow. Great comments, insights, and concerns. Let me address some of these.
First, the new pricing is $1995 per provider for the license. This is a one time charge for new practices (and includes the first year of maintenance, updates, support, and eRx). The $995/year after the first year is per provider. We are in the process of enhancing our payportal site to allow folks to pre-purchase at the current price to thus "lock-in" the older price for two years. This adds protection for the client, as well as the Amazing Charts company and ensures that users don't experience sudden and unexpected price increases while ensuring Amazing Charts can afford to get updated certification and add the features and enhancements demanded by our clients, as well as those required by the government.
In terms of the issues raised here (and elsewhere on the board). First of all - I understand.
I understand the frustration with the letter writer, with the lack of enhanced fonts and report abilities, and the other issues that have been noted. These issues will be sorted out and fixed - with user input. They are not being ignored. Their delay, however, is due to the rapidly changing EHR landscape including new rules (new certification requirements, DEA changes, etc), new money (stimulus $$$), new requirements for improved interoperability (RECs, Hospitals), and the rapid growth and dynamic changes that the EHR industry is experiencing.
The reality remains that Amazing Charts is a work-in-progress. (All EHRs are - they just don't publicly admit it.) While we have come a long way since our first version, we still have a ways to go to make this work great for everybody all the time. But that is absolutely our goal, and we will get there.
Our biggest assets (low cost and simple usability) are also our biggest difficulties (limited resources and figuring out how to make complex certification requirements easy to use). We must set difficult priorities and implement them in an order that sometimes changes based on government and third-party changes, and sometimes means we don't get the perfect solution the first time around. For example, we had to delay PM to allow for CCHIT certification, Surescripts certification and improved eRx. We have held the letter writer and making order tracking and immunization entry easier as we strive to ensure that we can support the PCMH and meaningful use requirements since money from these is imminent and delaying these means less money for the majority of our users. Amazing Charts must be eligible for every extra penny that may be available to help supplement the lousy reimbursements that most physicians experience, even if this means some users will be frustrated with certain features they know could be done better. And while I understand that not everybody agrees with these priorities, they are the tough decisions we've had to make to ensure we will be around for years to come.
So let me outline our current priorities. Our goal is to get the new ONC certification for meaningful use done by the end of the year and PM complete within that time frame (or very soon thereafter). These are currently our top priorities based on many of our users opinions, as well as the reality that the money is only available for a period of time starting in 2011 and ending in 2016.
Getting the promised features done in a time-frame that is promised, and with minimal bugs, is also something you have demanded and is absolutely a reasonable expectation. To that end, we have hired a bunch of developers, added a QA department to minimize the risk of bugs in our releases, and painstakingly attacked annoyances found in prior versions. V5.1, for example, (due out this month) literally has over 200 fixed "bugs" and other issues in addition to the major features of improved electronic refills and Surescripts certification. But these priorities trumped fixing the letter writer and other items that may seem easy to solve, but actually "touch" a lot of other areas of the program and will be quite programmer-intensive.
We have also added many new Help desk folks, and the learning curve of training these folks and getting them up to speed with our product, services - and most importantly, our corporate culture of fairness, honesty, hard-work, and dedication to our clients - takes awhile. (We have also had to fire folks who just couldn't get the standard corporate bureaucratic mindset out of their head.)
I couldn't agree more with the general sense I get from this discussion that it is critical that Amazing Charts recognizes the contributions and essential nature of our existing clients. Our existing customers are absolutely the reason we remain competitive against companies like Allscripts, eCW, NextGen, and other overpriced systems. These companies - like the vast majority of EHRs - charge many thousands of dollars more than we charge and generate millions of dollars in profits for their shareholders. They spend tons on sales and marketing campaigns and work behind closed doors with local governments, hospitals, PHOs, IPAs (and some of the RECs) to get their product disseminated to unwary physicians who end up paying a lot of money for software that makes documenting notes frustrating (or so I'm told by many clients that have switched to us from other EHRs - see some of the testimonials on our website).
For those who have been with us the longest and witnessed our steady progression, I would hope you are confident we will get there and end up with it done right. It may sometimes be slower than you would like (it certainly is slower than I would like), and there may be some hiccups along the way (remember the frequent Microsoft Access database crashes back in '96?), but we learn and adapt and step by step, Amazing Charts will continue to strive to provide the absolute best tool to help run your practice - and do so at a reasonable price.
