Most recent post on the Wal-Mart/eClinicalWorks go to market announcement.
Just gave a call to eClinicalWorks regarding the announcement last week in the WSJ that they will be the standard EMR for all of Wal-Mart’s retail clinics. Was looking to get more background on the deal and what it might mean to eClinicalWorks going forward as follow-on to my post last week. They gave me a rather curt response stating that any such inquiries must be taken up with Wal-Mart. Appears that the leak by the WSJ was a surprise for them.
eClinicalWorks was, however, kind enough to point me in the direction of another article published in the NY Tmes last week which you will find here. Although the article does not mention eClinicalWorks, it does provide further background on their plans and relationship with Revolution Health, who will run many of the clinics through their division, RediClinics. With Revolution Health’s involvement, makes me wonder if they to will make a play to have these patients sign-up for the Revolution Health PHR (which by the way is one of the worst I’ve demo’d). One of the more interesting bits of information in this article is Wal-Mart’s finding that some 55% of visitors to these clinics do not have medical insurance.
eclinical has moved all its operations to India since a year.which means-all practice data,patient files,hospital databases etc are open to a completely different site offshore in India.
this seems to be a part of their cost-cutting techniques.
Wonder,what that does to the security to these databases whose remote desktop IPs,passwords,accounts,claims everything is in t hands of a remotely-located near-untraceable techie ???
“eclinical has moved all its operations to India since a year”
Can you verify or provide proof of this?
From whom did you get this information?
Even if eClinicalWorks is handling its opeartions from India.They are doing a very god job.So it should not matter from where the resolutions are povided.But timely resolutions matters….that is provided by eClinicalWorks.Because eClinicalWorks have mostly Indians as their employees or techie……..people are under misinterpretation that the support is been provided from India.
I’m not under the impression that the support team is in India. I was told specifically by an ECW employee who was in my office that they ship people over to the states from India to work for them. So, technically, no they aren’t in India but they are all Indian and not long in the US. Most have very thick accents and are difficult to understand. The only ones who speak good English work in the accounts receivable department. Shows where their interests lie, huh?
This wouldn’t be a problem at all if problems actually got resolved. Decent enough program but I advise everyone I meet and talk to not to choose this product. Have had product for 6 months and it still does not work properly, nor is there any answers for what we need done. Product is not exactly what we were shown at the demonstration.
Thumbs down on this product.
their support sucks.
Spoke to eCW’s CEO recently at a local event and asked him directly: How much work is performed offshore, e.g., India?
Girish response: Virtually all development work is occurring at their HQ here in MA. Some maintenance/support work is done remotely (e.g. offshore), but it is a very low percentage as even here, most support is done from their US offices.
Would characterize this as a non-issue. All major enterprise software vendors today, both here and in Europe flex offshore resources to control costs of services provided. This is common and accepted best practice in the software industry – healthcare IT should be no different.
And Manny, if you can not provide clear evidence and examples as to why eCW’s support “sucks”, than we can only conclude that you are a competitor and eCW is destroying you in the market.
I was googling about eCW just because after almost 2 years of using it, I really hate it and need some “support’. I just find it hard to believe that so many people like its clunky, crash prone interface that requires you to navigate 5 screens just to input one piece of data, then go back 5 screens, then have to go into 5 screens again.
The templates feature is good, but then all your notes are basic rubber stamps of each other. If you just want to bill all level 4’s and 5’s it can work, but beyond that it’s just too damn unreliable and too clunky.
I will say this: that eCW tech support is barely adequate. They seem not to understand that not being able to access a chart or do a certain thing means your office is not running up to speed, but they sure take their time, and if and when they do fix things, it takes a long time and they never tell you what was wrong.
I will also say that things got SO bad, that we had to threaten eCW with writing letters telling them how awful their program is to the WSJ, NYT, JAMA, NE Jl of med and aynone else who would care to publish it. Finally, that got them to (barely) address the ongoing problems. But the crappy, clunky Windows 3.1 interface remains.
I have used about 6-7 EMR’s, and I will say that eCW is probably the best, but that’s not saying much. In the kindgom of the dead, the PEA (pulseless electrical activity) patient is king. eCW is a PEA. I think that they benefitted most from a very charming PR campaign, but when you peel back the propaganda and notice that while you are billing almost every visit as a 4 or 5, but you have to pay for IT, more staff to handle the onerous data entry, and you yourself have a day that is 1-2 hours longer, it becomes a zero to negative sum game.
I think people’s knee jerk reaction to EMR’s has to do with “it’s a computer, therfore it has to be better”. But healthcare is not as easy as stocking shelves or tracking inventories. You have to deal with people, and the fact that taking care or patients while using one of these EMR’s is as distracting as trying to drive with two wasps buzzing around the car.
That and the fact that the EMR’s don’t talk to each other is another serious issue, so I have to scan all the specialists’/hospital records in and manually enter the data
Peace!
What’s really going on here?
Most physicians are looking at this deal with purely a customer’s perspective, and that’s to be expected. What do you see when you step back and look at the big picture though?
You see a global marketing giant with an enormous physician customer base, a global leader in IT products and remote IT support, and a credible EMR/PM vendor with a working product and a nimble and cutting edge software company (unlike, say a GE). The marking component (Wal-Mart) is also rolling out it’s own emergency clinics in all of it’s locations that will be using this product and technology, and by the way, they also already have a major piece of the prescription pie.
When I look at this at the macro level, (forgetting even for a moment the so called “stimulus money, which will be like throwing gasoline on a fire) I see a potential health care juggernaut that will quickly have the potential to influence national policy at the de-facto – if not at the legislative level.
People (individual physicians) don’t have to like it. Frankly, it doesn’t even have to be a great product offering. (Everyone forgets how bad Microsoft was when it started out, and how they actually became the O/S and Application standard it is today.) All it has to do is work. And it will work. This will be a uniquely disruptive event in the marketplace with far reaching consequences for all industry stakeholders, patients, physicians, payors, and vendors.
One item of interest that brings this full circle is the ability to connect to a PHR, HealthVault, which was left out in the explanation. One more benefit I try to explain here.
From my blog and the Chicago Sun times: (same article)
http://www.suntimes.com/business/blogentries/index.html?bbPostId=BAfMYODD5A1mB4i22hiR9pHlCzCqEF2OOSdXWCz9ssYSvuXc2B
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2009/03/healthvault-device-connector-works-with.html
One would hope that the security package includes Dell’s Full Disk Encryption solution with Embassy Trust Suite. Otherwise, private imformation will be less secure — assuming any of the laptops attached to a given medical network can be taken home or stolen from the office whether it’s in Moscow, Idaho or Mumbai.
ecw will sell you product but then they will forget about you although they charge you monthly regardless.they have extrmely poor support
Talking about what a profitable, well run and heavily awarded company eClinical works is, and then actually USING it’s product are two different beasts entirely. Those who deny the massive costs of time, effort, loss of productivity and frustration are spot on. The salesman who presented to my partner and I talked extensively about the fact that the company is privately owned and not subject to the whims of the market. It took 4 years of use of their product for me to realize that should have been the biggest warning bell of all. They ultimately have NO ONE to answer to. Once you buy in, you are stuck and they definitely feel no obligation to respond in any kind of substantive way or admit any responsibility. Why should they? The current national public opinion and government officials current great push to force EMR onto the medical community is also no help (although I feel certain that it will take just a handful of future lawsuits and medical malpractice incidents related to the EMR’s before there will be scrutiny that will bring “solid” companies like eClinical works into the light).
Believe me when I say, if you use eClinical works, you will have many horrible incidents that will all be answered with the same level of true disinterest from ALL levels of eClinical “support”. They do NOT care to look any further into any issues than you force them to look. I will also say that, until you struggle through a major problem with them; being first ignored, then deliberately confused, then dismissed, then spoken down to, then begrudgingly acknowledged, saying that they are a “great” company with the “best EMR on the market” is absolutely just talk.
The thought that haunts me every day is that I feel certain that if I wasn’t really watching, many of the major issues I have detected with software would have gone unnoticed. I dread the knowledge that there are still many others currently corrupting my patient data, risking my patients’ care and medical privacy, and putting me at legal liability that I may not find. I would strongly recommend those medical professionals not yet duped into jumping onto this bandwagon too soon, to hold out and hold on to your paper records before it’s too late.
company should be shut down. policies in place have cost my co. thousands of dollars.
John Smith: could you get more specific when you state that “policies in place have cost my co. thousands of dollars”?
EEK-My group is seriously considering purchasing this product and in all fairness, we need to have the facts. Thanks so much.