Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Price Increase

Just figured I would start a thread since there will probably be some discussion on the price increase. Seems fair. Just starting the discussion. Maybe this will be the only post.

Hi Bert,

Seems like you know something that we don't...or at least that I don't.

Details please!

Thanks

Gene

I assumed you got the email:

Amazing Charts Pricing Announcement

Dear valued customer,

Amazing Charts prides itself on offering a certified EHR at the most reasonable price available. We are excited about 2018 and our plans to continue investing in our product. We do this with the goal of making your work easier and allowing you to focus on what matters: your patients.

We believe that investment in development is necessary in order to continue delivering a fully functional and enriched user experience. Our last price increase was in 2014, and in order to continue to invest in our product and maintain highly responsive customer support, while faced with increasing operating costs, we have made the decision to revisit our pricing, effective February 1, 2018. Our revised pricing will be:

-$1,495 annually for on premise support
-$1,495 for new physician licenses
-For Amazing Charts in the cloud there will no changes on annual support

Flexible add on services:

In the hopes of allowing our product to continue to be accessible, but still offering a comprehensive suite of optional functionality, we are unbundling direct messaging & immunization registry services. Our intention is not to burden all of our customers with the cost of these services. To that end, beginning April 1, 2018 we will offer direct messaging and immunization submissions as optional add on services at the following price points. All providers that are interested in these services can contact sales and use for no cost until April 1st:

-Portal & direct messaging $24.60 per month, per provider (billed $295 annually)
-Immunization submissions $16.25 per month, per provider (billed $195 annually)

Thank you for using our product; we look forward to continuing to maintain our high levels of customer support, while making Amazing Charts better than ever before in 2018. Please reach out to us at support@amazingcharts.com if you have any questions or concerns.

Kind Regards,

Russ Keene, EVP
Amazing Charts

Well, saw that one coming.

JamesNT

I agree, seems fair to me too. I suppose those of us that like Updox can continue with the Updox patient portal and not opt in for the AC portal and direct messaging.

Hi Bert,

Thanks for the heads up.

The email ended up in my junk email box.

Looks like a fairly reasonable increase.

Gene

How is it reasonable? Their product is not any better, tech support is less responsive than before. Aren't these features required for MIPS/MACRA?

I see the annual support fee for Amazing Charts in the cloud stays at $1195 (but then there are those $39/seat monthly fees to pay).

I'm not in the cloud, so this will be a 41% increase for me. $1195 to $1690 ($1495 +$195 immunization interface.)

Not surprised. Will stay with Amazing Charts.

It's reasonable, compared to the price of switching to another EMR.

Gene

There's also the real possibility the price increase is what is needed to pay for the additional staffing and tools to make AC better. For example, getting AC off of WinForms and onto Windows Presentation Foundation may not be easy. Also, there is the fact that AC is using SQL 2012 and 2017 has been released so it's time for another SQL upgrade. And those are just the things off the top off my head that need to get done.

JamesNT

If they have more resources for actual product improvement then fine. If it's just milkng the cow then not so fine.

My requests: hi-dpi aware GUI, bug/crash fixes, speed tune-up, and integrated portal.

I'm hoping that the do-nothing Congress will follow the MedPAC recommendation to trash MIPS for 2019. Small practices will still lose money, but I won't feel guilty for not trying to meet the ACI requirements. Torturing myself with the reporting requirements, tweaking the EMR to save the data, and paying AC & MDinteractive for a few percent puts me in a mean mood.

The 16.25 per provider turns out to be more expensive than building an interface for our practice after only 16 months!
So I basically get to pay more to do more work for no reimbursement. I would love the EMR to have great functionality, I'm not surprised by a price increase, but the idea of incrementally unbundling core features is a pretty big slippery slope to start sliding down.

Still trying to sort out MIPS and how I will approach it this year. It does appear that there are some features that we all need, and some that we do not. For example, I never give vaccines and do not need to participate with a vaccine registry, so I am happy not to pay for one. It may make sense to let us pick and choose the features we pay for, rather than having everyone pay for things we don't need.

It would be nice that if we are asked to pay for a vaccine registry interface that it be bi-directional at least. Here in FL the vaccines are just uploaded from Amazing Charts.

I think making things Al a carte going forward makes sense. Psychologically, though, it is hard to have features you are paying for and then have them taken away.

As an example, if eRx didn't exist, and then it was introduced for $250 annually, then deciding it is worth the investment makes sense. If they suddenly took eRx away and made me pay $250 annually, it would put me in a meaner mood than John.

Is AC v10.0 going to be out soon?