eClinicalWorks Reviews

1. Customer service- the majority of team seems to be in India. For any system down issue, you get help within 5 minutes. For general tickets for other issues, you get a call within 1-2 hours of placing the ticket. I like the online ticket process. I give the quality of support 5/5. Good videos to learn on your own time also. They all have accents but English is the primary language of India, and is easy to understand. There is good follow through to make sure your questions were answered.

2. Project manager- every office gets two contacts for any big issues. I have had an excellent experience

3. Costs- no surprise billing. Charges are reasonable and low and predictable. I do not like that they still charge $0.10 per outgoing text however. But there are many workarounds for that SMS costs.

4. Uptime- per year I think 99.9% up. They average 30 -60 minutes downtime per year. That’s pretty good.

5. Clinician point of view- very easy to use. All EMR have many required clicks. ECW is not more than the rest. The more you use it, you will find shortcuts. Personally I love it.

6. Billing- very good software for tracking and easy to learn.

7. Patient portal very easy for patients to use.

8. Self scheduling system works great for patients. Does not require a patient portal login to be used. Very easy setup.

10. Telemedicine - good product but I personally do not use it. I use Doxy.me which is free.

12. Kiosks- amazing and helps streamline check in process and reduces the staff requirements for checking in. Also it takes payments and copays and imports questions/answers into the EHR

13. Secuirty - we use SAAS. Works great. No issues.

14. There are two versions- EXE version and the Chrome version. Both are good. I prefer the EXE version.

15. Cons- their API is behind. Integrations are expensive if needed. Sms costs $0.10 each.

Company is VERY difficult to work. Generally, their business practices are questionable. They are not upfront with anything. When asking complicated questions, you have to ask four different ways, just to be sure they understood the question and answered accordingly. You are sometimes told you can NOT do something, to later be told YES you have always been able to do that.

The next day, when my staff and I showed up in the office, we were locked out of our entire system. Somebody had hacked our business and changed the profile and password. I was furious and called eCW, and they said they did their own "internal investigation" and said it wasn't them even though they were the only ones who had access that night. The office was opened for 3 years with no hacking or security issues until the night they were left with remote access.

Another time, the faxes were not going through (outgoing or incoming). We contacted them and they said that it wasn't their fault and issue because it was a third party software and that they are not responsible. I asked them why they are not responsible because we were promised a system with all the functionality and that I had contracted with eCW and that the third party software was not contracted by me but by them and is part of their system and that they are responsible for making sure it works and they just said it wasn't their issue and didn't give resolution. Yet you pay monthly for their support that is almost non-existent.

I quit their system and closed my office. Even though the data is owned by you, they will give the data free, but you can't read it at all. When you ask them how to decode the files under their format, they said it is up to your own IT people to figure it out. If you want them to give you PDF format, they want $5000 per provider to get your data/charts in readable format and charge you $500 for the hard drive that is only worth $70-80 (2TB Western Digital drive). You had to choose a closing date.

After we had decided we needed another month, we asked to close 30 days later. They told us no problem and did not mention any fees. Then they sent us a bill for $250 to change the closing date, which doesn't really increase their work. They still charged for that extra month for the support and the maintenance fee, so the $250 was just because I asked for 30 more days before I shut my operations. After a month after, they were still not done with providing my drive and data, so they didn't even meet the deadline of the closure.

They are horrible people who provide very poor service. Many EMRs may be similar, but my experience with eCW was just horrendous. My staff hated dealing with them too. They always tell you that it isn't their fault and don't know the complication. They offer no solution and ask if there is anything else they can do for you as if the job is completed when nothing was solved. Then I would ask if it could be something to do with another component and they would just tell you to send for another ticket so somebody else can get back to you. They wash their hands of the fact that workflow was poor due to complications that arise with their system.

We have been told over and over that our MIPS dashboard would be ready no later than June. Ours just launched. We checked our #'s, everything was populating then the upgrade happened. Once the upgrade happened none of our influenza or tobacco screenings are populating, we are having issues with no patient pics showing up, our previously documented lipids are nowhere to be found as well as our tobacco documentation from the patients' last visits. When putting in our millionth ticket, we were told that they could not locate the issue and to please provide an example. We gave several patients and they still can't find the issue.

One of our major issues is regarding the labs. Everything is pulled by the order date. On the flowsheet, the headers are the order date and not the collection date. Our patients don't usually get labs on the date of their visit unless we need to repeat them for some reason. They get their labs a week prior to their visit so that we can go over them with the patient and take care of any medication changes at the time of visit. We have had a couple incidents where because the labs are pulled by order date into letters, etc., that our Providers were looking at the wrong set of labs. It should always be headed by the actual collection date...throw the order date somewhere else.

As far as support goes... Good Luck! They take forever to get back to you unless you go through the Chat function, and they don't listen to help & respond. They half listen to your issue, SOMETIMES they are able to help but more times than not the response is that they need to talk to a different team and will get back to you. They then close the ticket and email you a partial answer or even better, they tell you that there isn't a fix at this time and we have to wait for the upgrade.

If eCW would thoroughly listen to your concerns and your ideas on how to make things better for their system, they wouldn't have so many unhappy customers. They should spend more time and money on taking care of their customers and less on making their National Conferences such a big to do. I know me, as a customer, would appreciate less extravagance and show from the conference and more for getting customers the support they need.

There are some serious security flaws with the web release of this version, which I've brought to the company's attention. Nothing has been done about it. Once you roll the SP2.5.12.2, you are expected to go on the web version; however, there is no way to lock down Remote User access. Once you download the plug-ins for Google Chrome, that's it... You have access ANYTIME ANYWHERE... BIG Security Flaw!! I seriously doubt this company does any testing prior to release... Their documentation is atrocious and it's NEVER accurate. Don't go with this company!! It's just not worth the headache!

Actually, the answer is "My team leader confirmed that it is an unsupported device". I explained that this statement is not an actual answer. I was then told "My mentor confirmed this is an unsupported device". Again, not an actual answer. I asked how they were going to resolve finding out an actual solution and I was asked what I thought they should do. After telling them that I wasn't privy to the internal procedures for problem solving customer issues, I was told they would get back to me. Every time I have to contact tech support, it's a fresh level of hell. If I get an answer to this latest issue, I'll update my review.

In January, they finally told me the structured data wasn't set up, so we would have to go back and manually redo many of the things that weren't reflecting correctly. They also told us we had until the deadline of March 31. Up until today (March 24), I was told in my noon meeting that I had a week to get everything complete. One hour later, at 1:45 p.m., I was told it had to be complete by midnight Sunday night because ECW was extracting on March 27. Basically, she said "Gee, sorry, but I thought it was March 31."

The potential loss of reimbursement means nothing to them because they still get their paycheck, but our doctors are looking at reduced reimbursement. They don't care, nor do they care that they don't share accurate information. They are one of the largest EMR systems and the smaller practices mean nothing to them apparently. I have seen lazy programming shortcuts and things that don't work right on a regular basis. One day, everyone can run a letter and populate the patient chart. The next day we come into work and half the staff can no longer run letters and they don't know why. It usually takes several hours for them to get it rectified and we're fine until the next unexplained programming glitch.

At the time of this verbal request we were told that ECW could do the billing for us using the application. We were told that having everything on the application would make it easier for reporting purposes. We agreed. Unfortunately, ECW never informed us that by using them to do the billing we would be using a third party biller. What is most disturbing is that from the time ECW started to do our billing they have not submitted our claims in the time frame that is required by insurance companies resulting into many claims being rejected for timely filing. We have on several occasions bought this to their attention. Additionally, they have sent statements to patients without our authorization and have added this to our invoice. We disputed this action since in NY you are not allowed to bill patients unless the insurance company says that it is the responsibility of the patient.

It was bought to our attention that employees of ECW RCM team contacted several insurance companies claiming to be our external office manager in order to get information. They have also changed the user name and password on the provider portals of the insurance companies. We have asked ECW to not do any more billing for us. They have placed us on support hold, preventing any needed upgrades and bugs from being fixed. They have refused to release the RCM portion of the application so that we can do our own billing. They have claims that we owe at first $4500.00. We disputed the amount. But instead of review the amount they increased the figure to $7500.00. Then a week ago they claimed that we owe them $10,000.00, and that unless we pay $7000.00 they would not release the RCM portion and would have place the practice on support hold.

This affected the ability of the physician to prescribe certain medication for patients putting patients health at risk and by withholding the implementation of certain feature on the application as requested by CMS jeopardized efficient care of patients. ECW advertises that its RCM charges 2.9% of collected claims, but charged us $1500.00 per month and refuses to provide us with any kind of reports, which we have repeated requested. When we contacted the sales office regarding the fees we are being charged monthly, we were told that if we are paying $1500.00 per month we are not using ECW, all checks are written to ECW. They are advertising one thing and are charging something else. The employees we spoke with seems to think that the company is accountable to no one.