Erik T.

I work for a practice that has 45 clinicians (counselors, social workers, & psychologists). The practice uses Valant as our EHR/EMR and this past year the quality of the user experience has seriously suffered. If you're considering subscribing to this service, I would highly recommend you look at other solutions. When it's working Valant is a decent EHR – I'd rate it at 4/5 when it's working.

If you do decide to move forward, be prepared for updates that are moved into production in the middle of the day, being on hold for 30+ minutes waiting for someone in customer support to take your call (who are nice if you do get the opportunity to talk with them in person), drafting emails to customer support (because you don't have the time to wait on hold any longer) trying to describe what was previously working before the most current updates were installed, and manually texting out appointment reminders when you figure out why clients forgot about their appointments (and then running a report daily to see if the automated appointment reminders are working again because there's no communication when it was fixed).

If you're on the fence about signing up, ask your sales rep the following beforehand:
- How thorough is your pre-production testing? Can your up-time be validated by an independent third party?
(This could be a tricky question because of what they consider to be critical. To me, critical is appointment reminders, the ability to document appointments, and the ability to schedule.)
- Does Valant do regression testing as part of their change control processes?
- Are there test scripts? Is it automated?
- Are the processes formalized to the point where you can show documentation where associates & their managers have signed off on testing before moving changes to production? What does your root cause analysis process look like when problems slip through? How do you prevent it from happening again? Would you be willing to show me some of the most recent documentation?
- What type of Service Level Agreement (SLA) do you provide?
- How am I compensated when the system isn't working and/or I'm spending time waiting for customer support to answer my call or spending time writing out a support email describing what's not working?
- Does Valant have a manual process they can run to ensure appointment reminders go out no matter what?

Sound technical? It is. If you don't want to find yourself pondering these questions, you're probably better served looking at Valant's competitors.
When they can provide answers to those questions, it might be safe to consider giving them your business.

I can't stress it enough, carefully read your lease contract before signing.
1) Be aware of the true lease term. I signed a 6-month lease at the beginning of the year anticipating 6 months of use. The way Regus currently words their contract is that the lease ends on the last day of the last month. In my situation, I'm paying for an extra month of rent. (For example: my lease started 2/3/2020. I anticipated it ending on 8/3/2020. However, the lease contract is worded to say that the lease ends on the last day of the last month. In my situation that's 8/31/2020. That's effectively a whole month more than I intended / budgeted for.
2) Be aware that they charge a "restoration fee" at the end of the lease of $2.50 per square foot of office space. Make sure your square footage is calculated correctly.
3) Pay careful attention to when you need to give notice that you're vacating / ending the lease. If you don't you risk the lease auto-renewing and being stuck for another lease term.
4) It doesn't surprise me that they're not letting people/businesses out of their contracts due to the stay-at-home orders around COVID-19. They're a business too and don't want to be left holding the bag. They're the 800-pound gorilla in the business relationship and the contract favors them. Even in hindsight, I don't believe they're going to let a small renter modify the contract with addendums that benefit the renter. Sure, there's a clause in the contract about Acts of God / Force Majeure, but it's in there only to protect Regus. It basically states that they have no obligation to you as a renter if they can't provide the services you've contracted with them to provide.
5) Before committing to a particular office, be sure to visit during a busy day and with the offices next to & across from yours occupied. I'm disappointed with the office space I've rented. When there are people in the offices, the walls are thin enough that I can hear their conversations. The office space does not really provide for the level of privacy and quiet that I anticipated for the money I'm paying (close to a $1000/mo). When I brought this to the attention of my site manager I was reminded that I can switch offices (and even sites), but it is necessary to pay the restoration fee for each office move / occupied.

I doubt I would have signed the contract with Regus if I had done more due diligence. Lesson learned.