Greenway EMR Review
by Andrew Eriksen | Posted under : EMR Reviews
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.
Tags : advertising campaigns, amp, database integration, demo, emr ratings, emr review greenway, fence, good friend, greenway, greenway emr ratings, greenway emr review, imp, partnerships, pcp, physicians, sales rep, sales reps, surgery center, work flow issues
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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
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
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
Definitely get everything in writing from these guys. We have been pleased with their technical support, but their sales and customer service leave much to be desired. They are in the practice of writing checks they can’t cash and we have been left hanging. The sales team does not have a clue what they are selling and will give you a headache just talking to them. As the user above mentioned, it is hard to gauge where they fall compared to other solutions since we have not tried many others. We are happy to be paperless and have been running Primesuite for many years, but it is not without its issues. Hopefully they shape up, or we will look elsewhere when EMR’s are more open source.
Greenway is by far the WORST company to do business with in the country. They are dishonest…I guess that is the best word to describe them. On every level they are dishonest. They could have the best product but their customer service is so horrendous that you will never get to use it. We signed the contract with Greenway in July 2090…and still in September 2010 we do not have meaningful use of their program. That is supposed to be their big selling point. If you do business with these people, watch your back and your bottom line…they are out to steal your money. They sy one thing and do another. Finally, we were supposed to go live this week and nothing happened. WE were ready on our end. When I finally got someone to respond to our request I was told that had been a change in personel and they would get back to me about who would support our Go Live day. Needless to say I have heard nothing. Sio I have been paying this useless company for a year and have yet to have any meanigful use. Please read your contract very closely. Do not trust a sales person with the company because they lie pretty uniformly. DON’T DO BUSINESS WITH THIS COMPANY!!! You will risk your money and more importantly, your sanity!!
Would have to fall into the camp of those who have been thoroughly disgusted by our choice of Greenway for our gastroenterology practice. I am young and new to my group, with experience of having used 3 other office EMR platforms prior to moving to my present location. The group (none of whom had EMR experience) purchased it both for clinic and ASC, totally based on a few brief demonstrations and a BUNCH of promises as to what could be put into place for our practice. I can tell you that unlike any other company I have EVER dealt with for Endowriters, EMR, or other computer projects – I have never had some many promises made where the company’s promise was based on the sole expectation that YOU as the practice would have to build/create/write in all up in computer language yourself. It’s been kind of like buying a car, where Greenway has many beautiful models on the lot, says “yes we do/yes it can” to anything you might inquire about what the car can do, only then find you have no spark plugs, battery cables, transmission fluid, belts, or gas line with which to be able to make the car get off the lot. As docs we are as human as the next guy, and there is truth in terms of us having realistic expectations about how life with an EMR is to be very different. Having used several EMR’s before, there may be a few weeks to get one customized to my style, but I have always been able to jump in from day one using it. We are still 3 months out and can’t make it work for our office or endo.
The company now admits that they have absolutely no endoscopy programs at all, in their library or otherwise (contrary to what was said in initial discussions). What groups use it for ASC’s have apparently had to hire an IT person on the side to come in and try and write them for the groups. We were told on front in that having Greenway in the office and in ASC would make everything seamless — YET Greenway is one of the few EMR’s that is still lacking in the ability to interface with anyone except just a few lab organizations…..they don’t even interface within themselves!!! All the regristration data that our staff have to enter on our practice side have to turn around and be re-entered into the ASC portion of Greenway because the two parts don’t talk to one another. If we stick with Provation or go with GMed then that takes care of endo programs as we are currently doing but requires continuation of having to scan the reports into both the ASC Greenway and the also into Greenway PM.
These are just the major and financially painfuly headaches. While practice mgmt part of Greenway seems to be OK, it has been awful in the clinic. Everything takes an overly complicated amount of mouseclicks to get to where you need to be, with buttons in what are not obvious places to be found and with cryptic symbols that you have to remember (little to no right-button functions). I cannot tell you the number of minutes and clicks it takes just to print off a paper copy of my daily schedule!
For some specialties, where scope of practice is very refined and repetitive, a template-driven EMR makes sense and should work fine. I would imagine that for OB, where most visits are checklists of things anyway, template notes would work great and do little to drain a docs efficiency. For any practice where there is considerable variety in the types of patients that are being evaluated, you will never be able to create enough templates to run smoothly (and if you do you will waste huge amounts of time sorting through the hundre or so trying to find the “perfect template” for that patient. Face it, folks–medicine is part science and part art. Patients are not like an automobile, and they don’t lay out their stories in the same sequential fashion for each disease. You can forget trying to do a note in the actual exam room–unless you demand that a patient keep quiet and answer only the pre-determined set of questions that you are fed on your template as the boxes scroll across the screen. I think most of us as providers would be sadly disappointed to see medicine reduced to such a level.
I agree with prior comments about anyone out there exploring options for EMR. GET ALL YOUR WANTS IN EXPLICIT WRITING before signing contract. Be very leery of Greenway right now until they listen to their customers and get their act together. If you have an EMR that is not delivering what would be a reasonably expected thing to deliver — give ‘em hell about and continue to press them hard – even legally if need be. I wish a few practices would start banding together in taking on Greenway, in particular, as I am afraid that is what it is going to take before they come back down to reality.
We have a cardiolgy practice that has been on Greenway for two years. We designed most of our forms (not from scratch) and are happy with them We were very late in migrating from another system to Greenway, but they met us halfway or better on reducing payments till implementation was complete. Their trainers are quite good and have not tried to gouge us when we requeted some customizaion. I think Greenway is best for docs who do not mid diving into the forms creation (it is easy) and want to go paperless.
There are some programming details that are obvious problems that we wish could be fixed and this is a drawback . Because of the flexibilty in forms, the database is not as structured or rigid as Nextgen This is a blessing and a drawback I think the buyer beware advice is appropriate, but the name calling is unfair at least in my experience, Greenway has always tried to be helpful. You still need a network administrator and document manager to get the best out of the program
Greenway is terrible! I don’t even have words for how awful it is! I was so excited about Greenway when it was sold to us. The sales team makes alot of promises that the product can’t deliver. Training is ineffective and honestly, the trainers are complete idiots!! Migration is a nightmare and your employees will wind up having to do more work instead of less. Do not choose this product!
I would have to say that Greenway has been an unmitigated disaster. I cannot comment on the comparitive cost to other products, but there does seem to be quite a bit of hidden costs that were not disclosed up front. That aside, the product is extremely cumbersome to use in both data entry and retrieval. I can best sum up this product by saying that it is essentially a paper chart that lives in the computer. As a urologist, I rely on historical data, trends, and being able to easily retrieve discreet bits of data (ie, when was the last lupron shot?) and being able to see the “big picture” at a snapshot. This does not exist with Greenway. The Urology specific templates do not lend themself to easy data entry, and frankly, do not flow well at all. While some may say this for any template-driven emr, Greenway’s templates require considerable type written data entry, which is very difficult to do onto the templates. For ancillary staff, this EMR has increased their workload considerably. It takes over a dozen “clicks” to process a single urinalysis done in the office. With most of my patients being referrals, it is maddening to have to consistently ask the patient who their doctor(s) is/are, to ensure that the primary care provider gets the note. Even with that, we are still relegated to mailing or individually faxing paper copies to the referring physician. The billing/coding personnel state that their workload has increased dramatically. If the intent of any EMR is to streamline the workflow, and increase efficiency, then this product has failed at every level, front office, back office, billing, and coding. This product may work for OB, for w hich it was initially designed, but it does NOT work for urology, and I would caution any urology practice to consider another product.
We also made the mistake of purchasing Greenway’s EMR. We had several issues with the training staff who came down for our implementation. VERY unprofessional, they were unable to think outside of their training notes.If asked questions on items not on their list they would inform you that they were not there to cover those questions, someone else would cover that later. One trainer decided she was too stressed out to finish the training and left 1 day early. This after she had been asked to train the front office staff a little more in depth. If you want to feel as if you are in high school, including the drama, then by all means buy their product. BEWARE they will charge you upwards of 30 to 50,000 for this fabulous service. Our office was sent an internal bill by mistake and noted that we were being charged from $50 to $150 per email, phone call ect., needless to say I almost lost it at that point.
To further add insult to injury after paying almost $40,000 for training (that I had to end up teaching myself thru tutorials) I just looked into implementing their portal into our website and was told I first had to pay an additional $3500 to be “trained” via the internet on how to set it up. After informing them that I had built websites myself and did not need to be walked thru the process. I was informed that they would not be “comfortable” not training me and would not allow access to the portal.
I refuse to give them one more dime of my money. I have already been taken advantage of .