eClinicalWorks

ECW has gone downhill with product and IT. We have been using since 2010. Used to have decent IT with quick resolve and solutions. Now it SUCKS with trial and error. No help hub for rollout for V12. What they advertise at convention is not even close to what you get. I am constantly having to restart the computer (I have max memory) when trying to print multiple patient documents, stating out of memory because on their end they can't support. Don't rollout a product until it is ready. Awful, disappointed and irritated!

I like to give Zero review because they don't provide services but just charged us money. It is very sad and very unprofessional. I would like to go with different EMR

We Practice this and its working awsome in our compnay at eemedix.com we use multiple softwere but eclinical is best in all of them.

Truly the worst piece of software I have ever used.
An interface that makes DOS look modern. For some bizarre reason, windows for clinical information are kept small, so all sorts of critical information is cut-off.
Everything is difficult, even simple prescribing takes too many steps.
Drug interactions are comically incorrect, users have to manually sort documents to patient, then subfolders (which have to be created by users themselves).

I only give one star because this site will not allow "0".
Truly awful

I am a family medicine user with mostly adult patients in a group practice.
I have to agree with most of the other bad reviews. It loses medications, slows me down and is generally mediocre. With no graphics and only text, I still don't understand why there is a lag when opening a window or changing screens. I have chosen to take sips of water or take deep breaths during these lags to better use my time. This software makes me feel like I'm using Windows 95 in the year 2023. So that means it will likely be useful around the year 2053. I saw a video of it in 2011 and it pretty much seems the same. The one good thing it does is keep text boxes that you can type, dictate or copy/paste into. This is helpful.

I give it 2 stars because I am not the only user. The government and billing side use it to generate data which it does well. The data may not be that good though. I would like to highlight their 2017 $155 million lawsuit that demonstrates what type of corporate citizens they are. Don't choose this if you haven't signed up yet as your life will get worse.

I have been using ECW since 2005. I don't think any EMR is actually good. ECW is ok at best, when it crashes or slows down, my whole office flow suffers. With the recent upgrades, ECW is so slow, i feel all I do is click on my laptop all day long rather than actually being a physician. I even upgraded my server, laptops, and wifi to speed up things, but that doesn't help much.

I really what to switch programs. Any suggestions?
-Frustrated Fam. Doc-

Despite selling practice in entirety and not having contract requirements their customer service is so poor I have been uinable to connect with cancellation specialist. I sold my practice in entirety in December 2022 and with the ECW team paid >10k for record transfer and cancellation yet they continue to bill in full monthly and I have had to get an attorney involved and even they are unable to get a response from cancellation teams. - Beaches Behavioral Medicine

The older version is more usable than the new one. No ability to right click copy and paste. You can do it but you have to use the keyboard. That's seconds more, and yes it adds up. More clicks to get to where you want. Pretty colors. Why would a user need that? The older black and white was less distracting. Very large heading on the patient screen, with the more useful information below the heading. Large letters. Yes you can reduce them but they end up very small on a laptop. Why? So dysfunctional. It's as if the software engineers did not get input from providers who have to see tons of patients a day.

We started eCW in 2020, after many prior "bugs" were worked out. It has saved our practice. We belong to a 150 physician group, who advised us to "Get eCW - if you possibly can - because it is the best for Family Practice and Internal Medicine". None of us like EMR's over paper - EMR's are a source of physician burnout. But, in order to survive in the current environment - you MUST use an EMR. We used eCW Televisits during COVID (for free). If we submitted a HELP ticket - we always got a response within a day. We are now doing full data migration and implementation. It is imperative that you build ICD-10 codes and CPT codes into favorites or templates, and you have to construct common templates for HPI or ROS - eCW will help you if you ask. The major hospitals are all going to EPIC - except VA and some rurals, which signed contracts with Cerner. Independent practices cannot have EPIC or Cerner (unless you are a group of 200+). All major insurances did an audit of our cases - 10 -20 cases each for Medicare, Medicaid, United, Cigna, BC/BS, etc. We could take our patient record and transmit it (along with all outside records) electronically to them - and survive. ECW has interoperabilty with EPIC, and ver. 12 will be even better. We currently get records from EPIC hospitals, through Healow Care-Connect. We can easily do electronic Rx and controlled Rx's on eCW. We invested in a fax server $2400 - and we can receive faxes and easily place them in a patient record. We failed 4 prior EMR's, but not this one. ECW has OUTSTANDING customer service! Also, many training videos and personal managers to help you navigate the building of your practice.
Much better than NextGen, Athena, and other stragglers that still exist - although Practice Fusion can be strong. A clinic needs a strong receptionist, biller, and IT help.

They present a great product and tell you about a great training program post-sale. Once you sign on the dot and give them your money, all this becomes smokes and mirrors.
They have canned lectures that they give you prior to you having used the product, so you are not completely sure about how things work and don't know what to ask beyond what they tell you.
Some of these were great, and some were completely useless; yet, even if you don't want it, they still give it to you as part of your training and there is nothing you can do about that. And after you use they product for a month or so and have all your questions, they tell you: Oh no, you used all your transition training, now pay us by the hour to actually train you". VERY DECEPTIVE marketing!
Which is sad, because the product is actually not that bad if you can get it to work for you, rather than you working for eCW.

No EMR is great, but ECW adds triple the work to any patient I document on. Lots of clicks, and blocks, small windows slow down the process of getting through this counterintuitive maze There are times when I need to check if a prescription or lab has successfully been transmitted. Overall the layout adds unnecessary eye strain. The system is antiquated, obviously doesn't have the input of a clinician.

Would you trust a company that settles with the US Government fraud charges for $155 million? Check your their settlement on the US Department of Justice web site.

This company has HORRIBLE tech support. Open up a case any maybe in a week you will get a call back.
When the tech calls you back with a resolution, you have to immediately pick up the phone. The will give you a couple of minutes to pick up. If not, they hang up and close the ticket.

Not efficient. Will drive your staff insane with increased hours attempting to navigate it. An embarrassment when apologizing to our clients and patients and employees for the sub par accuracy and performance.

We have been using this software in our primary care office for 8 years. The software itself has gone from bad to worse as more "features" have been added and more mandates complied with. None of the GUI layout is intuitive and we have to resort to technical support for issues that we should be able to figure out if the software was better. Our assigned tech support person is usually useless, although recently there must have been an uproar because he is at least getting better. Tech support is all India-based for what its worth and very compartmentalized so no rep knows more than their small area of the software. The software was designed in the 90s and patched continuously so now its a mish mosh of features where it takes many more clicks than it should to do something. Knowing what I know now, I would have looked harder for software that helps me as a physician complete the visit more efficiently and better for the patient, rather than giving me more work to do after hours.

It's just painful. Caring for patients at this time is difficult enough. ECW just finds ways to make much more painful. If you want to refill a prescription that a patient has been on for 15 years, be prepared to do a minimum of 15 clicks, many of which are to deal with warning flags that are absolutely useless. So painful. I which we never switched to this thing... Basic information is very difficult to find sometimes. You are not able to have multiple windows open (meds, prior notes, vaccine hx, etc) simultaneously and they try to address this by having all these horribly ineffective links and subwindows to give you "easy access" to information you need, but really, maybe they should just try to modernize their outdated software so that I can have more than one window open at once. It is just painful. It makes me want to find another profession.

I'm a programmer who used to write EMR software. Because of this experience, I know more than most about EMRs and how they are written, designed, and supported. EClinicalWorks is absolutely one of the most disturbing examples of an EMR company I've ever seen. The software is buggy and constantly introduces new dangerous ways that patients can be harmed with every new version. Old bugs are rarely fixed. When they are fixed, it's often years after being reported and by that time it no longer matters because you've had to train in the workaround for so long that it's now just the new normal way of running the office. There are literally thousands of safety issues reported on their support portal so it is impossible to educate yourself on all of the potential minefields and how to avoid them. Tech support is a joke. You cannot provide tech support for a product when your techs are supposedly "not allowed" to access phi. Techs never use their own login for support because it is blocked from accessing any real phi. So instead, they access your production patient data under YOUR login and then want to spend hours unsupervised playing with settings and troubleshooting in your production environment. Tech support has literally made changes to real patients meds and more with absolutely zero consequences. This company is nothing more than a dumpster fire that does not take customer service or patient safety seriously.

So they upgraded their software over the weekend
We come in Monday morning and nobody can log in.
Still no updates... seriously looking to switch emr to amd... small medical practitioners can't go down for a day because of incompetence of engineers.

Absolute worst support staff! We have had a myriad of issues with multiple teams working out all the continuous bugs, all of which are reportedly due to using an outdated eCW platform. Our IT team has spent countless time, effort, and communication to attempt to set up a timeline and timeframe to complete the upgrade. We have not received any response to simple, pertinent, and straightforward questions. The lack of professionalism and responsiveness has been unacceptable. ECW has made it clear that the only high priority task that results in immediate action is unresolved invoices. We will be withholding payment until this case will be given the importance it deserves and be resolved promptly.

I have thus far used practice fusion & eCW. I actually had much better workflow w/ the former.
Each update tht eCW has sent has made the workflow worse. MORE clicks, MORE windows, MORE time taken away from patients to document, MORE error messages, MORE effort put into getting ANY information. The documentation windows are so tiny you squint, the past history is even worse! I could go on and on. STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU LOOK ELSEWHERE!

Reading through posts, it is quite easy to notice what posts they wrote themselves - those are the positive ones. I heard good things about ECW, so I was excited when I found out that my new practice uses it. Little did I know! My primary issue is how terrible the "support" is: I mean, I just don't even bother talking to them anymore. They make you put the ticket through their web site, so Indian people can call you back. Those always ask you to get on your computer, so you can show them what the problem is. Except they don't get it. They waste about 1.5 hours of your time just to figure out what the question is. You just sit there and watch them click on things you already tried. Then they will keep calling you 80 times a day as you are seeing patients so you can again drop everything and watch them use your computer. 1-1.5 weeks later the issue may or may not be fixed but it no longer matters: you just want them to stop calling you with stupid questions instead of solutions.

I've used epic, cerner and cerner derivatives, CPRS, etc. this one is literally the worst. It looks like it is made for windows XP and is the exact opposite of intuitive. Very very burdensome. I have been offered a job at a place that uses this emr and am not even considering it because the emr is such a nightmare. This emr literally can't recognize simple symbols found on any universal keyboard, documents like telephone encounters are tiny unexpandable windows 1 in tall, pdf outside records viewer is unusable (to the point you have to download them to actually scroll through them).

This emr is 10 times worse than CPRS which was built in the 90s. Let that sink in.

Poor performance, fair customer support, upgrades are getting worse, web-based version is way worse than the desktop version

My company used eCW from 2005 until 2013 when we switched EMRs. I was attracted to eCW because it was one of the first affordable Windows based EMRs that integrated schedule, EMR, and billing functions in one platform.

The review by Mike C. Summed up many of our experiences, in particular that eCW was compartmentalized - like the referral function wasn't really connected to the schedule or EMR. It was very buggy and we had constant slowness and freezing of the application. The product was sold as a fully integrated application, but it felt like a patchwork of individually developed ones that didn't always connect to the database in the same or interact with each other fully. Support didn't do a good job of documenting our problems, so we needed to run through the litany of issues every time we called, as if it were the first time we'd reported the problems. We had the server on site.

The constellation of eCW abilities is impressive. However, it seems from the comments that this company continues its practice of over promising and under performing.