Home Forums Discussions General Discussion List of top EMRs per Medical Economics

I find it hard to believe eClinicalWorks and Athenahealth are on that list.

JamesNT

what's so great about SOAP?

I've talked to some users of athena and eClinical. They get lots of handholding to get their MU dollars & don't care much about generating 6 pages of crap as notes.

Money talks.

In light of all the issues with customer support noted lately on the Board, there's this interesting piece of information in the Medical Economics article-- AC ranked second for support.
One would have to wonder how they derived that ranking.

HI Boondoc,

I used SOAPware before I used AC.

SOAP is everything AC could aspire to be. Imagine AC with enlarged, easily readable fonts, self-expanding chart fields so one can view the entire contents of the chart with one simple scroll up or down. Imagine AC with a meaningful and annotatable problem list which would be carried through from visit to visit so one need only quickly look to see summarized all relevant problems and personalized annotations of each (not just pre-populated ICD names) . Imagine prescriptions which could be given custom names which would allow easy retrieval and reuse for any patient at any time once you chose a name and saved that particular Rx.

In Short, SOAP is what AC could have become had the absence of less than stellar corporate functioning allowed it to meaningfully evaluate and incorporate the myriad of helpful suggestions and improvements this very forum has made over the years (Remember, for example Bert's user survey of a few years back?)

At one time, I was more active on this forum, making suggestions - But I've pretty well given up trying

Bruce Morgenstern, MD (Neurology)
Denver, CO

Sounds great, I haven't used SoapWare since they redesigned it about 4-5 years ago. It was definitely an inferior product at that time.

I guess my big question is why did you change (and stick with, I think) to AC?

I actually thought the earlier versions of SOAP (in the 4's -up to 4.95) were great, with all the features I described above (and have petitioned for on the user board in AC).

In my experience, SOAP and its support seemed to begin to fall apart beginning with SOAP 5 (if my memory is correct). That was the time it was transitioning from an excellent clinical tool, to an awkward program primarily designed to document the criteria for meaningful use. That is the time I left SOAP and joined AC - about 3 or four years ago. I believe SOAP pulled itself out of a bit of that nosedive and has re-righted itself, but I've just stayed with AC out of inertia.

Here's a link to the post where I presented to the Clinical Advisory Board some SOAP-esq ideas for AC, probably about a year ago:

http://amazingcharts.com/ub/ubbthreads.php/topics/61327/Suggestions_and_Improvements_f#Pos 61327

Bruce Morgenstern, MD
(Neurology)

That survey was found to be inadequate due to the fact it was statistically flawed.