Describes eClinicalworks to a T. Will someone please tell those amateurs up in Wesborough that it’s 2009 and pick lists are totally obsolete? Why haven’t they figured out that the last thing I as a physician want to do is to click through 4 different screens for EVERY SINGLE LITTLE THING, disrupting my train of thought as I go along. It’s exhausting. At the end of the day after using it for 2+ years I feel like a boxer at the 15th round…. and I have a few hours of work still left when I have to go home. WTF!!!! This is after investing hundreds of hours in trying to customize the damn thing. And let’s not even go into eCW’s terrible customer support and unstable platform, with its constant crashes and supposed “patches” that make the program go cu-ckoo even more.

Where oh where is an EMR that will actually behave intuitively and actually work? I am young and very computer savvy, it’s not like I am a geezer that has never taken keyboarding. Take heed, and learn from my tale of woe with my EMR (eClinicalworks): they all suck. None of these EMR’s is up to anything close what you’d expect for 2009 software standards. But like eCW, they are all these little companies fighting tooth an nail to sell more software which don’t have the same budget that a company like Microsoft might put into Word or Excel. So while you think Word or Excel is great for storing data/words, don’t expect any of these softwares to be anything close to what you’ve gotten used to using in the last 10 years. (Full disclosure, the only relation to Microsoft I have is what I own of the stock in a mutual fund, maybe a few dozen dollars worth!)

Perhaps the focus should shift from aggressive Public Relations to more thorough quality control and software engineering? That’ll be the day.

Anyone reading this considering either eClinicalworks or any other CCHIT monstrosity take warning! Don’t be like me: stay with your nice paper charts. Just because it’s a computer doesn’t mean it is better yet. I am no luddite; when the day comes that these systems actually become intuitive and can talk to each other, I will be in heaven. Unfortunately we are still in the beta testing stage, with the users as the guinea pigs. It’s a bad joke… on ME. Think cell phones in the 80′s: shoddy, expensive and totally clunky. Let the shmucks who were naive and gullible enough to buy this junk keep beta testing it another decade. Be patient, you have little to gain and a lot to lose by being in the vanguard here.