Home Forums Discussions Amazing Charts Practice Management Complete Failure of ACPM on August 22 2016

ACPM has been down essentially all day. We have gotten inadequate support that has left my office hanging. A short while ago, I got on the product support and asked WTF was going on. Here is the thread, see what YOU think about this company:

Sandymar: "ACPM not working all day. Be truthful... what is going on? Rebecca I am not on the PM team, unfortunately, I am not sure what's going on. I know that developement is still working on it, but neither myself or the ACPM team member who I have here with me has been told the exact details of what has happened. they just know they are working on it. Sandymar: do you know if they expect to get it working tonight? Rebecca: I do not have an ETA as to when this issue will be fixed. Unfortunately we havent been updated since this afternoon"

Now, it is 10PM, ACPM is still not working and the best response Mr. Squire's company agent can give is that unfortunately she hasnt the foggiest idea why the product failed or when it is coming back on line.

This is unacceptable and lesser failures than this have brought down better companies than this.

Am I wrong? Is this just one of those technical glitches that we should accept? Or should we let the EMR world know that this is not a product they should consider.

Mr. Squires, where are you?

We had the same issue. Got through to customer support but, of course, to no avail.

All while seeing patients during school physical time.

We were unable to verify insurances. All previous PM systems allowed AC to retain this on site, but it appears that insurance information has been totally moved to the cloud, not giving us the ability to look up numbers in AC locally for verification externally. We then have to go into scans of insurance cards. My staff, needless to say, is not happy.

Not AC at it's best

It's 8:00 am and ACPM is still not functioning. Getting ready to call attorney yet anyone?

My experience is the same as yours. Tech support has me on hold checking the status. It would be easier to accept temporary failure if the company was more transparent

You are so right about transparency. This is the most runaround I have experienced with any SAAS situation. Seems like this is the end of ACPM.

I too was disconnected from ACPM yesterday morning, right after I finished my ERA downloads and ran my patient statements. Thankfully I was able to get that done prior to the disconnect. ACPM did come back up, albeit in a painfully slow fashion, yesterday afternoon. Now this morning, nothing. No connection at all. This surely doesn't bode well, but let's hope the team at ACPM can figure out the problem and get us all back online.

At least the raptors and t-rex won't get us with this system failure

^^^That was a joke^^^

From: Amazing Charts Practice Management Team

The Amazing Charts Practice Management team is fully aware of this issue and working to resolve. The problem is on our servers and unfortunately, at this time there is nothing that the practice can do to resolve this issue. This situation has caused a high call volume so we are trying to use mass emails and other types of communications to provide updates rather than an individual call back approach. Once we have the resolution we will provide a call back to all clients that have logged a ticket with our team to provide steps to get your systems back up and running. We apologize for the inconvenience but our technical teams are doing everything at this time to resolve the issue.

Thanks for the update, Jeremy!

MY doctor and I are HUGE supporters of ACPM--that being said I am very unhappy with the last 24 hours. We have had all of the same experiences as the other commenters, and I also was told this morning first thing at 8am that they have all resources working on this issue but cannot give any estimate of a fix. I do not understand how an update can completely crash a system???? And how can no one have a sense of where the issue is and/or how to correct it at this point??????

Waiting...impatiently.

They were supposed to be doing an update over the weekend, according to prior emails. Apparently something didn't work as planned ...........

Use has come and gone several times today. This is causing issues to say the least. Time down is money lost, I think ACPM needs to consider crediting monthly charges for August. Just my humble opinion.

Like many others, office staff very unhappy. This is a golden opportunity to establish an official "state of the system" medium. Many companies use twitter to post outages, and occasional progress towards repair. Getting some kind of update doesn't solve "unhappy," but does smooth it over somewhat. Silence is very frustrating. A simple post periodically doesn't take away resources from solving the problem.

August 24, 2016 and ACPM IS STILL NOT FUNCTIONING. NOTHING. NO MESSAGES. NO INFORMATION. NOTHING.

Mr. Squires/PRIMED-- WHERE ARE YOU?

Sandy Martin M.D., Esq.

I too am asking the same questions as Dr. Martin. This has surpassed unacceptable. The complete lack of communication is frustrating to say the least, not to mention a VERY poor business practice when you claim to strive for transparency. I feel there needs to be serious discussion about partial credit for ACPM charges for this month.

We have put our trust in your company and you are failing us...horribly.

My current conversation with support...

Derek
Hello. How may I help you?
KRIS
Good morning Derek. I am looking for an update on the ongoing situation with ACPM. This has gone beyond acceptable and frustrating.
Derek
8:11 am
yes good morning, so ACPM has been having issues for the last couple of days. The ACPM team says it will have some issues this morning however the ACPM system should be up within the next hour

A status update at least would take a little of the sting out.
Silence, in this instance, is NOT Golden.

It's ironic that most of us spend our day talking to patients and trying to explain medical science to many who don't have a clue. I think that makes it more difficult to accept the absence of an effort to explain the technical aspects of our current "illness". AC is drifting further from the roots of its success--physician focus and direction. Maybe AC should hire a "real" doc--not some corporate suit physician leader--as a part of the team (maybe spokesperson?)

1 hour later...still no ACPM at all...

ACPM seems to be up for some. I was just able to complete all my billing for the last 2 days. Trying to get it all in before anything else happens.

My current conversation with support... I didn't think this could get any more unbelievable...I was wrong.

Support Agent
Good
Christine
Hello. How may I help you?
KRIS
10:12 am
Hi Christine. I was told at 8:10 am this morning that "ACPM should be up and running within the hour" and now 2 hours later I still have nothing.
Christine
Hello Kris. I do see the ticket for that. I apologize for that misinformation, but that was incorrect. We are still not sure when the system will be back up. There will be an email going out very shortly with an update.
KRIS
Wow. VERY disappointing that we are going soooo long with no update at all, then are given misinformation. Thank you for this "update".
Christine
I am very sorry, Kris. I've informed our managers that people were being misinformed.
I really, really wish I had a better answer than that.
Unfortunately, we are about as in the dark as you are right now.
I hope the email that goes out shortly will have some answers.
KRIS
Thank you Christine. I will await my e-mail.

I have gotten zero emails about any of it! I called Monday and put a ticket request in because I assumed it was something with just our office. Tuesday I called back and left another message that I still have not gotten a response from. Tuesday mid morning, I did a text to support and that is when I found out about the system wide outage. As far as updates or emails, I still have received NOTHING!

From: Amazing Charts Practice Management Team

In order to clear up some of the communication, ACPM did have a system wide issue which was preventing all clients from accessing the system. Our technical teams are continuing to work through the issue and we will be systematically bringing clients back onto the system as we monitor the system and network traffic.

As a takeaway from this event we will be working on ways to better communicate to our clients on a global level so that information can be shared in real time and clients will not be frustrated by lack of response.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused to your practices.

It is nice to hear from Jeremy as well as his apology. However, his term of "an inconvenience" does not properly address the magnitude of this failure for the providers that have been affected for days. "An inconvenience " may have been a few hours but days should be described as what it means to providers in the revenue recovery and overhead to recover that revenue. For our practice this is not "an inconvenience". I called on Saturday morning and to date have not received an email or a call as the recording states. The guardian angel that indicates 24 hour support, with the exception of national holidays indicated that all of AC representatives were busy the entire weekend. Transparency in issues like this is needed and warranted. I do not see any of this from John Squires or AC.

I agree. This is making me SICK to my stomach. DISGUSTING.

It's working for me at the present.

I have been in discussions with them about trying to come up with a better system to let people know about outages. They are aware that the current system is inadequate. (Fortunately) they have not had a complete failure before that would test their need to contact everyone.

My sense is that they are not meaning to minimize the seriousness of the situation (although "inconvenience" is certainly an understatement).

Time frames in the computer world always have to be taken with a grain of salt. So yes, one day has turned into several. Hopefully, if it's up for me it might be up for everyone (but that has come and gone before and others have been up when I was down, so, as the teens say... "don't hate").

With all due respect, give me a break. This has been and still is DISGUSTING. Call me a hater, that's fine. Right now that is too gentle a word for the opinion I have of this company and its support. Perhaps they could have restored to a backup once they saw they had a disaster on their hands. I don't want to be coddled, I need my PM back and I need it now.

We don't yet know what happened. If both Southwest and American Airlines, with huge IT staffs, can have catastrophic system crashes, I guess we can't be too surprised when it happens to smaller shops. I would like to think they will learn the cause, take preventative measures, and possibly evaluate evaluate ways (redundant server, hot spare with data migration plan, or whatever) to get service restored faster. It could happen again!

The lack of communications regarding system status has been an issue for a while. The eRx and drug interaction systems have both crashed multiple times, with no notification sent out. I don't think any of us will be picky about what method of communication is chosen ... just choose one, and tell us. With ACPM and AC in the cloud, there are now four systems off in the cloud that can have problems. We shouldn't have to guess what the status is.

We are (maybe were) considering AC in the cloud. I will need to hear how the chance of this type of outage will be minimized, plans for a quick restore if it happens, and some sort of way to access pt data if it goes down before we decide to move forward.

@ Sandymar: If a backup restore was the simple solution, I hope they would have come up with that. Obviously it was more complex. It's still working for me, I don't know about you. I suspect it may be behind us (I certainly hope so.)

@Henry: I agree that communications is the key. While this is the most recent event and possibly the biggest involving them, (I'll put eRx in a separate category because often they are at the mercy of NewCrop or SureScripts) I think they have realized that they need to develop a better way to communicate.

They can use the yellow box but I think that only goes to everyone, not able to send just to subsections like ACPM users. I know that emails are an issue because they have stated in the past that a high percentage of emails are not read, and not just the junk ones from marketing. It's a perpetual issue to get the best way to contact and for each practice it may be different; MD vs office manager vs IT manager vs super MA. Email vs phone call vs text vs ????. Many of us received email updates, but some did not. I have no idea why not, but it may be worth understanding what information they have on your practice (possible wrong email or person)

I'm not apologizing, I do have some contact intermittently with people on the inside but I'm in the office just as you are. I guarantee they have heard the frustration loud and clear. The "answer" is to find the best compromise that will satisfy the most number of folks. You can be sure no matter how they do it, someone will not be satisfied.

How would you best like them to contact the practice? And what level? This could almost make a whole other thread!

When they want to get paid, they know how to contact us pretty damn well. It is 8 pm EDT and MY ACPM IS STILL OUT.

Mr. Squires: Where ARE YOU?

An Update on Amazing Charts Practice Management`

I understand your concerns about our Practice Management (ACPM) product. I have spoken to many of you personally. So here I?d like to answer some of your questions, give you the facts and help you make informed decisions.

Are we committed to the product? Absolutely. As you?ll see below, we have made and are making the right investments to fix the issues in the product and related services.

Below is a factual list of actions we are taking, and have taken, ACPM:

? Adding support staff ? the most frequent complaint I have gotten is the inability to get help on the phone. We originally had the philosophy of keeping your contact as the same Practice Implementation Manager who on-boarded you to ACPM. This practice has not worked, so we have added support staff- both for product/ usage questions as well as technical/ software issues. Unlike the past, these support techs are dedicated to ACPM and have gone through in-depth training. We are already seeing this change reduce turnaround time on incoming calls.

? Adding implementation staff ? In addition, we are adding more ACPM implementation specialists to help on-board new practices faster. Each practice gets a dedicated implementation specialist.

? Hired a dedicated trainer ? Training responsibility was previously spread among the staff. It is now consolidated with one trainer. We will add more trainers as demand dictates.

? Get you the software and training sooner in the implementation process- we previously waited to give you the software and training until just before go-live. We have changed this so it is much closer to the start of the process, giving you more tie to get and stay familiar with the workflows.

? Hired a dedicated ACPM Manager ? We are adding a dedicated manager with 15 years? experience managing on-boarding and enrollment teams at BCBS, clearinghouses and physician practice groups. He will improve our consistency and customer response.

? Automated the data migration process- previously this process was highly manual and time consuming for both your practices and for us. This process has been automated and streamlined.

? Implementing an improved practice portal so you can check the status of all claims and payer enrollments directly with the clearinghouse. Previously, this required that you go through us. This change is in the process of being implemented now.

? Making select changes to the ACPM product- based on user feedback. Short term, we have a list of customer feedback on bugs or needed enhancement that interfere with usage. In addition, we would like to streamline some of the workflows around the payments and posting processes. Longer term, we will be looking at a more significant redesign of some user interface components as well as the payments module, patient summaries and more robust reporting options.

As you can see, these changes are in the ACPM product itself, but more importantly in the support, on-boarding and other services around the product. Based on your feedback, this will be our focus for the immediate future.

As always, we appreciate your input and welcome your comments to the ACPM team. If anyone wants to discuss this topic offline, my email is below.

To jhowland, Docfoot, fjgomez1961, Sandymar, Parag, and others who have posted to this thread, please let me know whether or not we have dealt with your issues. I?ll be watching for your comments, and holding the PM Implementation and Support team accountable for your complete satisfaction.
_________________________
John Squire
President & COO
Amazing Charts
jsquire@amazingcharts.com

Oh, by the way friends, the above "response" was from September 3, 2015. I guess it will have to do for now....Sandy

I'm not an ACPM user, but Updox notifies about down times by text message. If you read the shout box, very few posts about whether Updox is down or not anymore. And believe me, it's not because they are down less often! The text messages are just a good way to keep users informed.

Yes, we haven't been able to send out any bills or post anything--but hey, patients are getting seen. The sky is not falling. I'm sure the ACPM folks are working on resolving the issue. We have appreciated the frequent email updates that have been sent out by Jeremy at AC. All of us that are still out of commission should have a nice glass of wine and put our feet up. It isn't worth losing sleep over.

"The more they overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

--Captain Montgomery "Scotty" Scott. Star Trek: The Search for Spock

JamesNT

August 25, 2016 and ACPM STILL IS A COMPLETE FAILURE. Definition: It's not working in my office....STILL. I put a phone call in to Mr. Squire, but he hasn't returned my call.

Sandy

From: Amazing Charts Practice Management Team

At this point, I?m able to provide additional clarification into the cause of the issues that ACPM has experienced over the last several days. Over the weekend as you are all aware we had a scheduled release which consisted of a product release along with some changes to the ACPM hosting infrastructure. The product release was successful, but we did experience issues with the changes in infrastructure. We have now corrected those issues and brought back online around the majority of our clients onto ACPM. The remaining clients will be back online by no later than 12:00 pm EST this morning. These actions also fully restore the Updox functionality

Our client services team will be reaching out to all of our clients throughout the day to make sure everyone is back up and running. I will be sending out another communication later today to provide a more specific timeframe for those clients that still are unable to login.

This has been a challenging time for all of us and we sincerely appreciate the trust you have put into Amazing Charts to not only be your EMR but also your practice management system. It?s important to recognize that the issue were not with the ACPM application itself but with the infrastructure that allows you to interact with it securely over the internet. The Amazing Charts team is committed to making this product one that we are all proud of and providing you excellent client support. Rest assured that your practice will not be charged for any days without ACPM service). Again, we thank you for patience and understanding during this time.

August 25, 2016 11:54am. Mr. Squire called me, thank you. ACPM is now up and running although the PRELOADING is very slow, and the LOADING is very slow. Once loaded, seems to be operating as normally.

Actually, it is not working properly insofar as all of the charges that were entered at SIGNOFF for each of the days that ACPM was out, are not importing over to ACPM.

ACPM MANAGEMENT TEAM--can you fix this please?

Sandy

Note: I am allowing these notes to display on the user board to see if other docs are having the same issues as the ACPM get re-booted/re-stored.

WE ARE HAVING THE SAME PROBLEM! OUR APPOINTMENTS THAT WE SCHEDULED IN AC WHILE ACPM WAS DOWN ARE NOT TRANSFERRING OVER EITHER!

Here is our office manager's reply when I passed along Sandy's note:

YES I CAME ACROSS THAT PROBLEM, WHICH I WAS NOT HAPPY ABOUT
I HAVE HAD TO MANUALLY CHARGE EVERY VISIT FROM THE PAST TWO DAYS
all my notes that were deleted from acpm have returned since it has been back today
and now i have to re-delete all of them again
plus when i enter insurance it makes me decide wether to "cross over coverage" something it never made me do