eClinicalWorks Reviews

Great EMR for clinic based settings loaded with features

Comments: Overall eClinical Works does a pretty good job as a clinic based EMR. It's fairly comprehensive and once you learn it, it is very easy to fill out notes, auto populate data, code for billing and handle messaging and e-prescriptions.

Pros:

I like how comprehensive the EMR is, information is fairly well laid out and it has lots of features including a messaging service where memos from patients, forms from pharmacies etc can all be accessed and responded to without having to give out the providers email address or phone number.

Cons:

It can be difficult to learn at first and find all of the information it holds. Sometimes the locations of certain tabs aren't very intuitive. It's also annoying that you can't have more than one tab up at a time to look at multiple patients at once.

Functional basic EMR

Comments: Overall very functional EMR with a few small nuances.

Pros:

Easy to navigate through the program. Relatively easy to order medications and eprescribe. There is a bit of a learning curve but is easy once you get the hang of the program.

Cons:

The health care maintenance checks were lacking and left a lot of gaps for follow-ups. The E-prescribing was sometimes confusing when it came to choosing a location.

You can get by with it but it is plagued with unhelpful support, errors, and out-dated

Comments: Not satisfied.

Pros:

You have the ability to do most things you need for medical practices. You can schedule patients, upload documents, run reports, bill and make claims, submit claims electronically and through paper printing, fax, e-prescribe, make telephone encounters, keep user logs, etc. It is an overall all-comprehensive product.

Cons:

There are so many glitches it is pretty ridiculous. We are always playing catch up to fix numerous things that goes down. There is never a 2 week period where everything is running smoothly. The technical and customer support is also weak. They do a good job of getting back to you most of the times, but it takes them quite a bit of time to figure out what is wrong and fix it. Not only that, but communication is a bit tough as I believe most service technicians are located out of country and have heavy accents. ECW also charges you for so many add-ons that it gets to get ridiculous. They push their products and interfaces so that you need to pay them more than the monthly base. Also, ECW is starting to get out-dated and behind. When we first signed up with ECW about 14-15 years ago they were top of the line. But they have quickly fallen behind all the other electronic medical records systems that have started. It has been frustrating trying to keep up, especially because of all the new medical record regulations government has been pushing. ECW is also not friendly with other databases. If you need to submit certain information and electronic secure messaging, you can only do so by forcing the other party to sign up for ECW's communication system which of course no one wants to do. Also, if you try to switch out of ECW, all the data in ECW cannot be transferred easily. They purposely make it hard for you to switch out and hard for anyone to work on tech. I'd say skip.

Great Program

Comments: I have utilized eClinicalWorks with two different organizations. I always found it to be extremely user friendly. Staff did not complain about it either which is always a plus. Physicians also found it helpful and easy to navigate.

Pros:

The ease of use. It does not take long to get comfortable with this program.

Cons:

not many people are familiar with it....But I do not think that is y'alls fault.

Post Go-Live Implementation is a headache

Comments: Simple problems and questions are quickly answered (generally with-in one day) but more complex problems or implementing new programs takes months and the projects often get lost in a run-around of tech supports.

Pros:

Ease of scheduling patients and reviewing labs/imaging/documents.

Cons:

Implementing new features often takes months of back and forth with tech support.

Disappointed Customer

Comments: I found that this system puts my patient's health and lives at risk. It populates diagnoses not entered by the medical staff, sends out prescriptions in dosages that were not ordered. They acknowledge that there is a problem with the system, but still gave me a hard time when I was forced to cancel the 3 year contract at 2 years and 3 months. I was told they were local - but when I requested early on to have someone come out to help us with the system, they said they were located in India and were not able to send out a live person. Very disappointed in this EHR system. And, they charge for every single thing that other EHR systems include in their price. Overall, it became a very expensive system.

Pros:

One of the reasons why I chose eClinicalWorks was because I was told they were on the East Coast of the USA. We have had systems located in California which proved to be problematic because they did not have 24 hour customer service and the time difference was a problem. I was thrilled to find out that eClinicalWorks was on the East Coast and in my time zone. They sent out someone to train us. At some point, eClinicalWorks moved out to India, and suddenly we were on very different time zones and the level of customer service was nearly non-existent.

Cons:

1). Freezes at a minimum 10 times a day requiring a shut down of the EHR and re-logging in. Trying to "reload" does not work. 2). Does not successfully send prescriptions to the pharmacy. I need to check every single prescription I send to any pharmacy for each individual patient to be sure it was successfully sent. Even though it is documented that the prescription was sent in the note, the pharmacies do not get them. 3). Support has no idea why the system is malfunctioning. Every time we put a ticket in, it is not adequately addressed. 4). Populates diagnoses in a patient's chart that were not entered by the providers or staff. 5). Sends out the wrong prescription - called support and was told that this is a kink in the system - this is a VERY DANGEROUS kink! 6). My staff has spent an exuberant amount of time with the help desk without any positive outcomes.

Horrible unless your goal is slow torture until death

Comments: Shoot me please!!

Pros:

Ability to set up standing order for lab is easy to use.

Cons:

Lord, so much! This is designed for medical mistakes and torture on many levels. Can you image having to find your own name every time you want to do a telephone message? True! Think of stupid stuff like that at every level!

Invoice

Comments: The Strategic Account Manager is constantly changing and he/she providesno support with the company.

Pros:

Follow up on problems to see if resolved.

Cons:

Be careful of their invoicing. They have this complex procedure and time element whenterminating a provider. They even wish to interview the terminating medical provider.All notifications need to be within a certain time frame. If not done correctly, theywill continue to invoice you for the terminating provider

It gets the job done

Comments: It gets the job done for us and it probably just like most other EMRs they all have issues but at the end of the day they allow you to record your notes and bill the insurance.

Pros:

ECW can get most of what you want done. I work mainly on the reporting side and staff support. The ability to pull reports is pretty good with their EBO system. We get almost everything we need reporting wise from that system whether it’s financial or encounter data. Their support is pretty responsive usually calling back the same day in most cases. Their billin service is pretty good and is very reasonable. Our company pays about 8% totally cost with ECW which is pretty much the industry standard.

Cons:

There are sometimes a lot of clicks with ECW. Anytime you do an upgrade something is not going to work which is very frustrating. If you are a CPC practice you will be frustrated as their reporting dashboard took until the middle of 2018 to start working and then we upgraded and now we are waiting on a patch to get the dashboard back up. Don’t expect to speak to anyone that’s first language is English when you call support. We started with ECW in late 2015 and we had to setup everything from scratch which we thought was really strange as they have so many practices you would think there would already be templates for almost everything.

It, mostly, does what it advertises.

Pros:

It's generally fast, and responsive for providers to put notes in. It does what it advertises.

Cons:

We have to restart the program often. If we have more than one instance open on a laptop, it often crashes the pc. When adding printers, you have to restart the software. Support takes hours to return on tickets.

Sufficient but lackluster

Comments: After using the product for 10 years our practice had learned to master the inefficient workarounds to where they have become 2nd nature. Unfortunately, recent server stability issues forced us to look for a new solution. Our hosted platform was eventually upgraded/moved to a more stable server farm however it was too late and the process to replace the software had already began. We eventually migrated to a new solution.

Pros:

The price? As far as bargain EHRs goes, this is probably front runner, but the industry is lacking in innovation and functionality and this product is no different. Where you save money up front you pay for it by having a lack of features and seemless easy to use workflows. We constantly had to create nonsensical workarounds to achieve an acceptable workflow that was less painful for the providers but made it 10 times more difficult for the staff.

Cons:

As a provider, you grade how easy an EHR is to use based on the number of clicks. As an IT professional you are able to assess a software's efficiency based on numerous other metrics. As the later, I can say by far the worst aspect is the number of clicks. With no redeeming qualities to speak having to drill down 5 or 6 menus to get to a patient's documents or financials and then be forced to back all the way out before checking on a 2nd patient's info is maddening. User's are forced to keep 2 instances open so as to not be forced to close a patient's demos/chart if they have to take a call and open a new patient's chart. This of course is explicitly denounced by eCW as forbidden. We do it anyway ... it's the only way.

Customers are NOT the number one PRIORITY

Comments: Over all the system is easy to navigate. The look and feel of the product are very pleasing. If I could have my old, local technical support back, I would highly recommend this product, but due to the past 3 years of terrible customer and technical service, I'm reluctant to refer other clinics to this product.

Pros:

Integrated system. Easy to maneuver from the front office to back office features. Many new enhancements over the past 10 years. "Trying" to stay up to date with moving target of healthcare.

Cons:

Technical support is lacking immensely. The techs are more concerned about closing your "help desk ticket" than really helping you solve your issues. eCW states they are a Meaningful Use Certified EHR but have left their existing customers of almost 10 years in the dust when they discovered a programming error. Now clinics will be penalized 3% in Medicare payments in 2018. Report features are lacking. As of recently, they nickel and dime you for every new feature, upgrade, and/or request, such as interfaces, customized reports for all the government mandated programs, enhanced dashboards, etc. Communication with their customers, or lack there of, is very frustrating. eCW believes posting critical information on a website is "sufficient enough." When you're going to shut down the entire system for 3 days with no access or you tell your customers they're meeting meaningful use and then 7 days before the end of the reporting period eCW "discovers" their system is NOT reporting right, this should be important enough information to communicate directly to the customers, right? Nope, eCW posts the information on their website and "hopes" you log in a read the paragraph in a timely manner. NOT acceptable in my eyes. Mountains of improvement in customer service.

Never used more glitchy software, nor a more poorly designed UI in my life.

Comments: The owners/managers of this company need to sell to new managers who can overhaul the entire operation.

Pros:

Ostensibly offers many features, from an integrated EMR/PM system to registration kiosks, etc... Once the kiosk app became functional (took months...see below), we were able to decrease our reg desk staff.

Cons:

1. As others have stated, the initial 5 day training period was mostly used by their staff to fix their own glitches and get the the software to a base functional state. 2.5 of the 5 days training period was used to fix things like scripts which simply didn't work. So much of the provider training time was a total waste. we were than charged additional money to have them come back and spend more time with us. 2. Content is not provided. We were told the system can be used for urgent care. after all, one fo the largest chains int he country uses ECW. They didnt tell us that chain spent a significant amount of time and money customizing the system to suit the urgent care need. 3. ECW is unable to provide suggestions for how their software should function in an urgent care environment. asking them which flow would be ideal for their software is a useless question. 4. Their software was designed by folks who have never heard of UI/UX or Human factors. As others have noted there is not a consistent use of symbology between screens. There are often multiple ways to do the same function on one screen. Sometimes the label "close" means one thing on screen but another on another screen. 5. tech support is obscene. We were unable to unfavorite certain meds form our list. It took them weeks to months to figure out why. 6. Multiple sections of the software are labelled "procedures". one area results in a CPT code being auto listed on the billing screen; one area does not. Many other illogical quirks exist as well. Good luck trying to teach every new provider these types of quirks. 7. If you are an RCM customer, many of the features they use to market themselves are simply non functional. Patients of RCM clients cant use the patient portal to make payments since as an RM client, the software does not correctly send balance data to the portal. But if you call the "portal department", they are unaware of this problem. The web based version of their software to this day (early 2019) does not receive correct balance information for patient accounts. So, even if the providers and the medical assistants use the web based version, you still have to maintain the desktop version for the front desk staff. The UI is totally different between the two systems, so you effectively have to train your staff on two different systems. Ridiculous. 8. Their entire development team and tech support team is in India. Consequently, we had to spend significant time fixing the kiosk application since literally every screen in the app had typos, grammatical mistakes and phrases thats imply didn't make sense. I screen capped them to have proof. They simply didn't understand why i couldn't use the kiosk app as it was delivered to me. This means they never even bothered to have one of their US based staff look at the product before it was released. 9. They wanted to change the pricing scheme in the middle of our contract due to legal issues they had in NY. So, they changed it in their favor without discussing it with me. Their financial analyst then used seasonal data, and ignored the peak season in doing so, to justify their new price. Had they been intellectually honest and used a full year of data, it would have altered their conclusion about what the new pricing scheme would have cost me. Dishonesty like that has no excuse. 10. Despite asking them if the price we would be paying for the software included everything as an RCM customer, and them replying yes, they then proceeded to charge me hundreds of dollars extra for each provider per year to use the escript controlled substance feature. So yet Another set of conversations resulted in a reduction in price for a period of time. 11. Can't even count the number of conversations I've had with tech support, their own billing dept, as well as their practice liaisons who knew nothing about urgent care. I want the year of my life I've spent with them on the phone back.

Poor Service All Around

Comments: Overpriced, non human staff, English is horrible,not reliable.

Pros:

Nothing, something was always not functioning.

Cons:

Very cumbersome always had new charges to integrate other equipment or software. No reliable SAM and not accountable. Offered to cancel and they kept me on for longer and now I am being charged to be released. After the retention department begged me to stay. What a very costly system especially during theses times.

Nightmare

Comments: They are 100% offshore support. 98% of the people that call speak so little English that you have no chance of having any sort of meaningful conversation. Every single time we do a patch update it takes 5-7 hours on top of the line hardware. About 50% of the time the patch fails and it takes a whole day or two to get the correct people from ECW on the phone to resolve the issue. They have account managers assigned to clients and they don't do any account management. I am not really sure why that person exist as they provide no value to my clients. Do yourself a favor, do not consider this product. It IS worth it to pay more for a better supported product. If you want to spend countless hours arguing or just trying to get a response then buy this product. Given the current level of support I wouldn't be surprised that they go out of business in the future.

Pros:

It was inexpensive, and feature rich when we purchased it in 2010. The ability to self host is great to control the user experience.

Cons:

Support, updates, cost. They are changing the way features have worked or been charged for. As a result you are forced to pay for something that was free for years or it stops working.

This software company continues to update the software and tries to keep up with the ever changing Health care industury

Comments: Support has improved over the past 6 months. The technical teams really care about solving the issues that arise. You can really tell the staff at eClinicalworks are very committed to customer satisfaction. When so many companies are not concerned with customer satisfaction I am glad that we are using on that is.

Pros:

Always changing and updating the operation of the Software to keep up with the ever changing Health Care Industry

Cons:

The Software is so flexible and we have been using it since 2006 we really need to develop additional ways to make documentation of Progress notes easier for the providers. When we were trained back in 2006 to develop templates and to use the software for our Providers a lot has changed over the years. It has be difficult to keep up with all the enhancements and developments to the software. Now is the time to really take a good look at how we can go back to making documentation even better for our providers to improve their experience with seeing the patients and not feel so much like it is all about computer documentation and not about the patient any longer. As we move forward into fee for service payment for providers, more is required of the providers and easing their burden is key.

Terrible, Poor problem management

Comments: Honestly, I dread being on the phone with their IT department. It can take several days for their IT to call back when your system is down or completely slowed. They also take no responsibility for minor glitches in the system. They say "well, it looks like we do not see it here" yet you reported it for 5 times, they still do not acknowledge that it's a problem or do anything to prevent it in the future. Their communication is also very poor. We use some ipads in our clinic, with the ipad upgrade, they did not inform us that it will disable many features of ECW and completely slow it down. When they were able to fix this problem, we were not notified of the changes either. Honestly, there's such terrible communication with this company. They outsource their calls to people that do not have clinical knowledge and it's frustrating to explain EVERY single step every single time. Their multiple clicks just to be able to complete a task is also extremely inefficient. There's just so many frustrating aspects of this system. MOST IMPORTANTLY, if you think they will transfer your old data over correctly. They are lying!!!!

Pros:

It has the ability to send messages to patients by using voice features built into the system.

Cons:

If your fax, progress note, or any problem occurs. It takes them weeks to fix. What is most frustrating is that their IT department does NOT try to resolve your problem but find excuses to close the case. Most of the time, I can't even understand what the engineer is saying. Mainly because they send me information that is almost entirely numbers, related to their system. Without having proper training, how would someone be able to understand that. What's even more frustrating is if you have problems with their interface with lab, they expect you to contact the lab company yourself and figure out what it is they need.

Terrible EMR

Comments: Terrible, terrible EMR. Don't buy it, I beg you. I'm taking early retirement from my group in large part because of this program.

Pros:

I honestly like almost nothing about eCW. My practice switched from a fairly basic but very functional EMR (SRS Health) to eCW about a year ago. It has been an unmitigated disaster. The training was terrible, the support slow to respond generally and the user experience unbelievably frustrating. I've wasted so much time clicking around trying to complete the most basic tasks it makes me want to cry. If forced to pick a pro, I'd say...actually I can't think of anything. I hate it.

Cons:

1. Illogical workflow. I could go on a long time about this but I don't have room. 2. The web version and desktop version are significantly different so if you go home to finish notes, which I have to do almost every night, you have to remember to do many tasks two different ways. Here's one frustrating difference. You can fax prescriptions from the desktop version but can not from the web version which means if I have a controlled substance to send in I have to wait until the next day when I get back to the office and can use the desktop version. 3. There are too many other cons to list. They are mostly numerous little things that slowly drive you mad. Morale at our office has been terrible since we changed to eCW.

Avoid eClinical Works at ALL COSTS!!!

Comments: Horrible, as soon as I saw the entry screen which says "Building your user experience" I felt like I should punch myself in the face. I'll tell you how bad this EHR is- we switched from Soapware to this in 2018- it has been atrocious, I deferred the choice for a new EMR to my wife/office manager and biller- I have built up a very successful practice over the last 18 years, including building the 6,000SF structure myself- I would close my practice and go work some other job, giving up 18 years of hard work, if I had to continue using this EMR. WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS HOW AWFUL THIS EHR IS! If you hate your very existence on this earth then definitely use eCW for your EMR. I would rather be in prison. We are looking at others currently.

Pros:

There are NONE! This is the absolute worst EMR I have seen, way too many button clicks to accomplish a most basic task, very difficult to use, awful set-up, will slow you down.

Cons:

Everything! Medications don't esend reliably, templates awful, spell check worthless, 10 clicks instead of 2-3, and a vast number of useless buttons that cannot be removed.

Beware

Comments: Terrible customer service. Outdated platform. Expensive. What's not to like? When I left I paid them $5000 to get my records to transfer into my new EMR. They sent me a hard drive with data in random arrangements and corrupted data. Nice.

Pros:

Some of the features are nice, you can enter your consultants (but you have to do this manually). Has eprescribing but difficult to get lab interfaces or controlled eprescribing. Notes do look like notes and some of the templates for exams are easy to use.

Cons:

Wow, where to start. This is a spaghetti programming system that is so screwed up it will never work correctly. Every time there is an update, multiple things stop working. If you have problems good luck getting someone who speaks understandable English or even someone to respond to your issue. You may get a response several days later at 9PM. The only people there who speak good English are the sales people (shocker). Until I went with a different EMR I didn't realize how many work arounds I had been putting in place.

TONS of features but poorly programmed.

Comments: 7+ years using this software and it's been a battle all along. Then they create policies (such as, "You must be running on Windows 10 PRO - not the HOME version" THey use those policies to tell you it's not their problem when something gets screwed up (like their server being disconnected, or blocking you for security purposes ACCIDENTALLY!! They won't even look into the problems if they notice you are not on the PRO version of Windows ... despite that it works fine on every other computer in your office on the HOME version.

Pros:

Lots of features eRX templates for Progress Notes

Cons:

Poorly programmed (Frankenstein'd ... relies on other programs for many functions - which they don't tell you) Many of their tech support people are incompetent and it can take days to get something repaired. They NEVER take responsibility for their problems. It's always a battle. Poor P2P support with non-ecw practices MIPS Dashboard still not functioning as one would like despites many years of user feedback ... makes choosing quality measures difficult.

Poor training, Horrible customer service, very expensive monthly fee, incomplete set up

Comments: it's been a battle from day one, starting with their un-organized and poor training week for physicians and staff, having incompetent trainer, charging for a trainer who's knowledge base was zero, forcing clients to pay for trainers air fair even if their BAD, they will

Pros:

patient scheduling is good, we were told reports are great but it was not at all good or user friendly.

Cons:

No upper management, no one is there if you have complains, you're on your own. During the demo they promise you the moon and the stars but deliver nothing

We switched to eCW two years ago and have never looked back, very forward thinking.

Comments: Ease of use from clinical side, good product from Practice Management. Forward thinking with patient engagement.

Pros:

Our clinicians feel that the setup is much more efficient than some of the other eHR packages we have use. I like we're they are going with the web based content and PHM. We see a lot of value in the product and feel it has been a great investment. From a financial standpoint, the monthly subscription service helps small businesses who can't afford to put up large sums of money for initial license fees.

Cons:

Their report generator is a little more difficult to use than some products, or you don't have access to all fields. We utilize their Query writer often and then dump the data into Excel. Their Report Writer suite can be powerful, but requires advanced knowledge of query writing, which many small to medium sized companies likely will not have available.

Steep Learning Curve with ECW

Comments: In general, a electronic medical record system is very helpful. I think ECW needs to listen to the user experience and make some adjustments. It should be more intuitive and less frustrating!

Pros:

There are some positive aspects of ECW. I like that you can create treatment plan templates that are accessible with a keyword. You can easily copy forward your last clinical note.

Cons:

I have found ECW difficult to learn despite having a two day in person seminar and watching their training modules. I have used other electronic medical record systems which are more user friendly. The biggest con for me is that if you type in certain areas (medical history, social history) it is included in every note of every provider moving forward. I work in a primary care clinic, so there are several disciplines working with the same patient. I don't want my information automatically included on the PCM's note and vice versa. The only work around that we found is typing all my history in the "examination" part. This does not make for a well organized note and it is more difficult to easily access the information in future visits, but it does keep the information private.

My ECW Experience

Comments: Overall I think there is some improvement that can be done, but ECW gets us through the day to day functions. The support staff could be a lot better. All in all, ECW does what we need it to do.

Pros:

ECW offers a lot of features that our staff utilizes. Our staff loves the jellybean system and how it makes referral, telephone encounters, messages, etc easier to see. The resource schedules are very simple to view and utilize. Running reports in ECW is super easy.

Cons:

The staff support is slow with ticket response. Even when the ticket is marked high priority, the response time takes hours sometimes. We experience a lot of slowness on a day to day basis. This is referring to the ECW product itself. Our providers have complained about being in the rooms with patients and having to stall due to system slowness.