Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Who's used AC with AC hosting it?

Our ten-internist practice is looking to adopt its first EHR next summer. We're more interested in an SASS EHR that in having it on our own server. Has anyone here done that with AC, or can you point me to a practice that has so we can hear how it's gone? Thanks, Jay

The more users you have, the less useful a cloud product is. You'll have very high monthly costs due to the high number of users. There's a reason why larger businesses opt for onsite email and onsite software.

If you've ever used Remote Desktop, that's what the cloud product is more or less. Except on the other side is a host with a dedicated line and takes care of backups and whatnot.

I guess this kind of shows how many people are using it.

We are a small practice, only 2 users have logins for AC, and we moved to AC cloud in August and it works great for our practice. Just as fast or faster than locally based, and the peace of mind about security is well worth it. No need to worry about security about server in the office and easy to login from anywhere. Made attesting for MU and the security measure very easy!

Amy

Our experience with hosted services is that it works great right up until the point that it doesn't work. Then it is a catastrophe, and you can't stay up until midnight to fix the problem, because it is not under your control. I have learned my lesson about not being self-sufficient.

Everyone needs to have a backup plan for when *stuff happens*. Part of our on-boarding is focused on plans for various *stuff happening*. Being paranoid is an under appreciated skill set.

The weekend after Sandy we spent some time helping some practices come back up - that means everything from battery power, a way to access your DB backups if you need to restore to an alternate laptop, accessing backups without Internet, etc.

Living above the snow line (we were @ 8600 ft), we had to have plans for days/weeks without power or road access. Food, water, wood, lanterns, battery power for antenna amplifiers, even a walk-out plan. Lori also always had Uncle Mossy in the event that I was on he road. We kept our office at Lake level, near the co-lo, so it was almost always up. Of course, chaining up to just check email is a serious de-motivator.

While we do not currently use AC Cloud, we eventually would like to. One difference with AC Cloud is that the monthly fee is in addition to your initial license fee and annual maintenance. So, if it went down, you should still have your system on your office network that you can fall back on. A nice
"plan b."

I have not yet seen a cloud-based emr for under $400/month for the first doctor.(but it may be out there). For use, this would amount to a total of about $233/month due to the extra $150/month for the cloud - based capability. This still much less than any other cloud-emr solution (except Office Ally). Unless I misunderstood something.

Which is exactly what we recommend for our Managed Environment clients. We keep our systems up, but we can't do anything about weather, or the guy down the road with the backhoe. SO, if part of the solution is always having a backup local, you always have a plan B, and if we can't connect to do it for you, we can talk you through it on the phone.


I go out of my way to not promote our services [Too much so I've been told by some of the regulars], so I will reply on point.

We were asked by AC to demonstrate the model after the last ACUC, and we did so. What we learned later after showing the environment to AC Doctors was that they wanted the business model tweaked for the lowest possible monthly cost, and pay as you go if you need something. That said, we offer the base environment for up to 5 users for as low as $149 per month. If you include the cost of the optional AC maintenance, that is $233 per month.

Has anyone tried to "roll your own" cloud Amazing Charts ? The idea here would be to set up a virtual server running windows server 2008, and just copy the Amazing Charts partition to it at the end of the day. When the local server goes belly up, run off the cloud for a week until it gets back going.

Dizzy,

You might want to talk to Wendell since he is in your neck of the woods, and has also been experimenting with virtualization.

We have done implementations for practices that want a local server so we took a beefy box, installed CentOS, installed a fresh AC server, as well as VMs for additional 'cloud' desktops that perform better than their aged desktops.

With enough internal disk and an inexpensive NAS, there are regular full images of the server, incremental DB backups, and images of the 'desktops', and the practice has multi-point redundancy. Takes more expertise, but completely 'doable'.