Brandon,
I'm pretty amazed at reading your post, actually.
You did, indeed, enable 35 visit units on our system, so that we could evaluate the system without wasting real "patient visits". Our agreement was for us to purchase 350 patient visits - which indeed we never paid for because the product NEVER WORKED. We didn't purchase the 35 - your people GAVE them to us so we wouldn't waste our "real" patient credits while playing with your product. If you recall, we had also agreed that when we had finished with demo patients that you were going to reinitialize our database so that the demo patients wouldn't be in our real database with our real patients. YOU agreed to this.
Our system WAS NEVER ENABLED for the 350 patients. We elected to walk away from your product before the 350 patient credits were enabled.
Let me remind YOU of a few "reasons", Brandon.
The code you sent us a patient NEVER left the office - they always showed as still being there. Whenever the program was restarted, everybody was magically back! We were told that that had been fixed. Um.. ok.. then why are you sending me code that's broken when your REAL users have this fixed? You finally attempted to send me a patch - which did not work. Seems we're the only client you had who ever had this problem. Um.. ok. If your installed base were anything like Jon's, your phone would have been ringing off the hook about this for days - but ok, whatever. You're right, the product works JUST FINE.
We didn't evaluate the product in the middle of a conference, although part of our evaluation period was during a weekend while we were at a conference, I'll admit. I spent well over a week - in total over 30 hours - and every place we looked the product was buggy as hell. If you recall our conversation, when I told you - and I quote "It doesn't look good", we had quite a number of issues, not just the "Elvis hasn't left the building" issue.
We refused "training" because even the functions we tested which did not exactly need a rocket scientist to use - like checking a patient in and out - didn't work. At that point I was not willing to invest any more time in your product.
During the online demo, by the way, we also kept trying to steer you to closing out a patient encounter, coding it, printing it, and billing it, and we were never able to get that particular part demonstrated. We also were never able to get your product to actually do that when we had it in real life to play with. Very simply, in a demo what we wanted to see was patient transaction cycle - get them in, document them, code them, print them, bill them. You wanted to show bells and whistles, not core functionality, and we didn't seem to be able to steer you in that direction.
Quite frankly, this is why I don't spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on software without being actually able to run the program in a work environment, and do not consider purchasing products where the only pre-purchase hands on is the salesman driven "demo" or a flash movie of the product. The "wrangling" you talk about, from where I'm sitting, was that I'm paying you half the purchase commitment to be able to do a real evaluation of your product, rather than committing the future of my practice and potentially thousands of dollars on a mission critical business application on a guided tour. I'm not willing to buy something outright to later find it doesn't live up to its promises, which is unfortunately all too common in the EMR world, and the software world in general.
Simply put, Brandon, your product didn't work. No way around that. Attacking me and calling me a deadbeat is fine, I can accept that. You're right, I didn't pay you - and you didn't deliver a product that worked. In my book, that makes us square. Sorry you don't see it that way. I'm open to discussing a reasonable settlement with you - but it's not going to be paying for 350 patient encounters we're never going to use in a product that was buggy as hell. Actually, at the time this was ordered you were given my credit card number. You could have charged it at any time.
Brandon, I'll admit, and EVERYBODY on this board knows that I've had issues with Jon and Amazing Charts at various times during my relationship with him and his company, and have frequently been pretty frustrated with him. My career before medicine was computer engineering, and I've been in the software industry since 1974. I need my tools to make me more productive - not add tons of extra clicks and screens to simple patient encounters. Maybe for a practice like ours PAPER is a better alternative to ANY EMR. Maybe not. Whenever I get frustrated with Amazing Charts I go looking to see what I can replace it with - and so far every time I come back to Amazing Charts. Yeah, it's frequently a love/hate relationship. I'm in a rare position where I can actually write patches and fix bugs, and sometimes I DO INDEED get frustrated with Jon over whether he'll accept a patch upstream. No secret there.
At the time I contacted you we were seriously looking to purchase another EMR. We looked at a number of them. Yours didn't make the grade. Sorry. If it's any consolation, neither did the other two semi-finalists we evaluated.
If you want money, great, lets talk. You spent a week on the phone with us, and I do not expect you to totally eat the costs of that - but you're not getting $350 for code that never worked.
You've had your rebuttal, and I've had my say in return. Sorry your feelings are hurt.
Regards,
V.
