I got the following email from an EMR vendor that highlights a number of interesting things about what it’s like for customers interacting with their EMR vendor. It’s very much in line with the experiences I’ve seen and heard. I’ve removed the specific EMR vendor names since the names don’t matter as much as the general experience. Instead I’ve used “small EMR vendor” and “large EMR vendor” and “ePrescribing solution.”

I was looking for an ePrescribe solution to interface to our small EMR vendor about a year ago and settled on using ePrescribing solution. As you probably know, they bailed out of the business and sold their service to large EMR vendor. Now we’ve interfaced our product with theirs.

The thing that makes me chuckle is my clients beat me up all the time on saving “clicks” and yet they don’t say a negative thing about the steps associated with large EMR vendor. I guess its because they know I have control over my product and they realize there is zero from the large EMR vendor.

As an observation, questions and low-level technical support was very, very good from the old ePrescribing solution. It appears to be non-existent with large EMR vendor – maybe because they’re busy dealing with so many conversions from the purchased ePrescribing solution? Don’t know. I also know from first-hand experience that support is rather poor with large EMR vendor.