Advisory Panel: Recent Vendor Experiences

The HIStalk Advisory Panel is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. E-mail me to suggest an issue for their consideration.

If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.

This question this time: Can you describe a particularly good or bad experience you’ve with an IT-related vendor lately?

Explorys has been great to work with as we focus on connecting our community physicians

I have been very pleased with the responsiveness of our consultants and vendors to lower their fees in order to help us meet our budgetary needs around our $100 million plus implementation. It has become clear to me which vendors can be relied upon to become true partners in which are only in it for themselves.

We’ve had a very tough time with Voalte. Call quality has been pretty awful and Voalte hasn’t been able to delve an app that addresses the problem. They keep telling us that the iOS7 version of their app will correct the problems, but they do not recommend that we deploy that version. Hmmm. 

I’ve actually mentioned this vendor before, but they continue to provide major benefit to me. Virtual Procurement Services.  (VPS). They have saved our organization millions of dollars in capital and operating expenditures. It’s an interesting model, actually, probably worth one of your interviews.

I continue to me amazed at the poor state our vendors are in as we prepare for MU Stage 2. They blame CMS and ONC and say the certification process is broken and that the regulations come out too late and are not fully baked, but the fact is they are sending us code that doesn’t work and isn’t ready for testing. Many of us are in jeopardy of not meeting MU S2 since we will have to wait until Q4 leaving no room for error. The vendors must do a better job getting us a product we can use as we face the challenges of implementing the processes and workflow changes that are required once the software works.

A CDS vendor with a good presentation of a great product, concentrating on our EHR and our issues. They are Dutch, so they already know about ICD-10. I guess that identifies the company.

Predixion Software, good experience related to analytics, supporting our clinical staff in better management of readmission rates.

None of late. Still ramping up in the new gig and the only net new I have hired is the Advisory Board for ICD-10 help. We just started (I know, I know – this is way late but clearly one of the reasons I got hired!)

On the good side, a vendor sent me a holiday gift card that could only be used for donation to a provided list of charities. You could donate on behalf of yourself, your organization, or anyone else. On the bad side, any and all vendors that send you half of something expecting that you will meet with them to get the other half of something that as a whole you couldn’t and wouldn’t accept in the first place.

I was just discussing a system upgrade with a manager. The upgrade turns out to be a reimplementation. The ballpark cost provided by the sales guy/gal, that we budgeted, has now tripled. While I’m obviously not opposed to a vendor improving their product, I think they should be assuming some of the additional expense. While they are changing the system’s infrastructure to something “better” there is no acknowledgement that their previous infrastructure may have been somewhat lacking.

Unfortunately all seemingly middle of the road/mediocre.

I work for a vendor now, but when I worked in a hospital, I found Iatric to be the most responsive vendor we dealt with. They were professional and very quick in all responses. If we had a problem they would have their people work through the night to fix it. Literally every dealing I have ever had with anyone in that company has been positive.

A general experience growing with vendors who really do not take time to know or understand customer needs. Let’s stop cold calling and cold emailing in health IT.