I will be visiting some offices and speaking with some physicians/administrators who are currently using or have previously used the Greenway EMR/PM program. This will be an important evaluation for us because of the growth Greenway has experienced in recent years. They have been very successful in some of their advertising campaigns and VAR partnerships. We would like for anyone who has experience with this program, good or bad, to post their experience below. I have already spoken with a few practices who are still on the fence about the program and but plan to make a decision by the end of this year. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. A good friend of mine is a PM&R doc and he just purchased the Greenway suite for his office and surgery center. I did not agree with the way Greenway did the database integration between the practice and ASC but other than that the local VAR seemed to be a responisble IT vendor.
I think the thing that bothers me most about most of the EMR companies out there is that the EMR/PM sales reps are complete idiots when it comes to practice application and work flow issues. It is really pathetic when you sit through a demo with a PCP practice and the EMR company is showing you how great the program works to schedule surgeries. Or how about, sitting through a presentation in an ASC with a sales rep who is showing you how the great the program works in a hospital setting. These “minor” issues just go to show, in my opinion, how little most of these EMR reps really know about the work-flow differences between specialties and facilities.
Thank you for the information. I like your idea about incorporating the litany of promises into your final contract. This would undoubtedly show the true colors of your emr rep and how much of what they tell you is part of their sales pitch.
I have gone through a Greenway install.
- I would say their training at their corporate office is a total waste of time, (I went through it twice and the people did not know how to train the attendees -Sorry, I use to teach in some universities and teaching takes experience and training in teaching),
- It seems that with Greenway you have to turn off your MS server updates, so there seems to be compatibility issues between Greenway and Microsoft (which concerns me).
- Greenway has a lot of hidden charges. and I will stop here.
I would not recommend Greenway having experienced it and I have over 20 years of IT and install experience. I would look at the new GE products that I heard are impressive, NextGen and Intergy (SAGE).
In the end, there is no perfect product and they all have either faults or disadvantages.
Be aware of the following which is just human nature. When a practice looks to buy a package (and most have little experience in doing so- so they are effectively ill equiped to choose a package) and decides on one, they will say it is the best. But these same practices have not scene other packages in action so they really do not know the real differences between them.
This is a slippery slope as most companies are more intent in selling a package then improving it.
HERE IS ONE Piece of advice that I will give all. When you are talking to the vendors sales rep and they make committments as to what their package will do, write it down and have the sales rep sign the comments as being valid. Then at contract time, ask that all the signed noted be part of the contract. It is at that time, that you will find all the benefits that you were promised that do not exist today BUT will in the future.
Good Luck.
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Lawrence Schindler MHA
Tucson AZ
hituqo…
Download mp3 with Gp Style
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I will let you know that Greenway has been an huge and costly disappointment. We purchased the EMR for our office and ASC Endoscopy Center. The sales person made several promises and assured us that the product would work like our current one and that we would be able to continue taking pictures during our procedures. He also assured us that we could go completely paperless along with several other promises.
I don’t even know where to begin. At our go live the pictures didn’t work and we were unable to take pictures. The templates which they stated were in their library were not even close to being adequate and they had us build them, when they were supposed to be training us on the system.Greenway sent trainers that had very little experience with the company, in fact one had only been with them for 4 weeks! Two of our Pysicians worked 40+ hours on templates and the nurses had to completely build our templates, because they had none for the procedure room nursing notes. The Medication system uses the non approved abbreviations that have been in effect for years, so we would have to change every one of them. Then they did not send the paperwork for the third party billing and we recieved no payment for 45 day and finally we went back to our old system until we get this resolved. No one has called us and we had to have our lawyers send a letter. We finally recieved a copy of contract, which they never sent back signed by their President, with items underlined such as “use the Greenway library at your own risk”. I would hope if they were first in KLAS they would make sure the customer who is making a huge investment would be better taken care of. Communication is bad and the service is worse.
Talk about hidden costs. They charge for emails, phone conversations and some of the training staff stayed at reasonable hotels, while others stayed at very expensive hotels and ate like kings and we are the one footing the bill. We did get it in writing that they would have pictures by go live, but it seems they write their contracts, so that they have several outs. They have 30 days to fix all the items and I hope they do, but at this point it looks like they have taken us for a ride. Get everything in writing that they promise before signing.
Sallie,
Thank you for your review of Greenway, you are not the first to express this point of view regarding support and implementation. Many of the larger companies use outside companies for implementation which rarely possess the individualized training required for efficient implementations. It is unfortunate you had to go through all of this as I am sure it negatively impacted your cash flow and provider productivity.
I hope that by now you have overcome the initial hurdles and are beginning to see improvement in your workflow and provider productivity.
Please keep us posted as you move through this process.
Andrew
[...] EMR By Andrew Eriksen Sunday, March 28th, 2010 This a review from the Greenway EMR Review (Read Here) that I felt was worth sharing as a warning when dealing with majority of the EMR/EHR vendors. You [...]
Sallie,
Would you mind sharing the name of your sales rep? I’m curious if he still works for Greenway and if we may be dealing with him. We really like the product.
Gerry
I just happened to come by this site and was surprised by the negative comments regarding Greenway. We implemented Greenway in January of this year and have had a very good experience so far.
Ours is a 15 provider practice in South Carolina. We implemented the Practice Management first and the EMR next. I agree with the comments that a user made in one of the earlier posts, there is no software out there that is going to be a perfect fit. Having said that, Greenway was the closest to a fit that we could find. Below are some of my experiences with our Greenway install and life since:
- Integrated seamless integration of the EMR and PM components with single login (I don’t recall seeing it in any of the other products we demoed – Allscripts and Nextgen included)
- Intuitive use
- Extremely knowledgeable salesperson in Nick. His knowledge of the product made it so much a easier sell for us as we knew we had an added resource to go to once we went live. I don’t think he ever mad a promise or sold a feature that the product did not have. Now there are features that were supposed to come in a future release that are not out yet and we might have had some expectations that they would have been out sooner.
- We were at 100% of our volume on day 3 of implementation
- A 10% increase in revenue due to better tools in tracking patient visits, insurance verification, insurance claims, and patient balances
- Training expenses and training billing could have been managed a little better from Greenway’s end.
- Knowledgeable help desk on both chart and pm side. Rarely have I called the help desk and not got someone on the line that did not know the answer to my question or could not get it resolved within a few hours.
My belief is that any successful software implementation has 6 components to it
- Good Software
- Good Training
- Good Processes
- Able employees
- Good Data during transition
- and most important of all a strong leader who can manage the project and control the demands and manage the expectations placed on the implementation. This perhaps is the number one reason implementations go sour.
As long as a practice keeps its side of the bargain, I don’t think they would have an issue implementing Greenway. I would recommend Greenway to any practice but make sure you have your ducks in a row and don’t expect a plain software switch to solve all your problems.
Having said all this, is Greenway perfect? They are a fast growing company and have had their fair share of growing pains that at times have been a frustration to us but at the same time has been insignificant when compared to the gains in patient care, productivity, and revenue.
Thank you for letting everyone know about your positive experience with Greenway. I think that everyone considering an EMR should read to what users of the EMR have to say but should not let that keep them from demoing the software. Every practice is different and every doctor has their unique set of requirements for an EMR to work efficiently in their practice. Keep the reviews coming as they have helped over 4k practices so far make their EMR selection decision.
-Andrew