DrChrono

Pros

I love how very self explanatory Dr. Chrono is. I find it very easy to navigate from reporting to scheduling. The support staff is very responsive and attentive for any and all questions. Any time I needed assistance I received responses promptly. Every staff member that I spoke with always took the time to show me step by step instructions and were always available for follow up questions down the road.

Cons

The biggest problem that my clinic has run into with this software is that we have three different doctors in our practice that each have there own ways of taking payments, but because we only have one license for Dr. Chrono is hard to know which doctor the patient owes money too considering they see all three. We have worked around the problem, but it's very time consuming.
Also the reporting was very minimal but has gotten better through the years

Pros

I liked being able to work with an iPad on it. Their big claim is that it was designed for use through ios systems and iPad. I feel like they put a lot of effort into it at first and have not progressed since the iPad was first released. The bottom line is that it could be sooo much better than it is.

Cons

The meetings with the Apollo+ team. They did not listen to us on a consistent basis. After attending meetings for 3 months and telling them the same thing for several weeks in a row, I gave up and just tried to do as I was told. We had to basically cancel Collectly because it did not function as advertised. My patients received bills from Collectly the same day as their appointment before my biller could enter their copays. I LOST PATIENTS BECAUSE OF THIS DRCHRONO.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to DrChrono

Pros

As both a Chiropractor and Functional Medicine Physician, I appreciated Dr. Chrono having the EHR set up for chiro, while being integrated with Fullscript for supplements.

Cons

A lot of things, unfortunately. There is a monthly fee for documents and forms to be used on the EHR. There was no integrated 2-way texting, so that had to be integrated 3rd party. The scheduler options for making patient careplans were severely limited compared to other EHRs. Other 3rd party integrations were needed to complete the EHR, which should not be the case for the price.

Pros

The scheduling is ok but everything else is hassle.

Cons

I hired a doctor and for me to add him i had to sign the contract for 1yr. He quit within 2 months, now they wanted me to continuously pay for the monthly premiums despite the fact he's gone and there's no use there. So image paying $$600/month for a provider who's no longer practicing. After speaking to their executive team, [sensitive content hidden] stated it would be a breach a contract which is complete bullshit. very disappointed

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing DrChrono

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to DrChrono

Pros

This is great to use for anyone that has to deal with medical records. It helps keep you organized

Cons

I didn’t notice anything that I didn’t really like about it because it was so helpful for me

Pros

Was great the first 3 years. Now that new company took over it’s a disaster.

Cons

Claims processing is completely horrific. Since they moved to I house clearing house from Trizetto we have had no claims processed in 2 months. There is no real support anymore. You cannot talk to a person. It takes weeks to get a response. And their staff is incredibly uneducated in claims billing. We never had these problems before. Even appointment scheduling had been an issue with losing data recently. They refuse to cancel my contract even though I did not agree to a fee increase or a renewal. I did not sign a contract with the new company. They refuse to speak on the phone. Their customer service is non-existent. They couldn’t care less if you are happy with the service or not.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing DrChrono

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to DrChrono

Pros

I really liked DC when I first got it in 2018. For the past 2 years, it has become a nightmare. My only problem is that I have no many notes and medical records that I can’t change EHR easily otherwise I would do it today. Highly unreliable and too expensive for poor quality.

Cons

Their abrupt slow speed in the middle of a busy day when our whole medical business comes to a stand still. It has caused us thousands of dollars loss as providers were unable to see patients but we still had to pay them for their time.

Pros

1. HIPPA compliant.
2. When their system is not crashing or updating, notation is good for the most part.
3. I like being able to schedule patient’s from my phone app.

Cons

1. Customer and tech support are 0 help! Basically tell you all the things a person with 100 IQ would have tried and when that doesn’t work they tell you ‘Well, tough turds, thanks for your money. BYE!’
2. The frequent system crashes, updates that don’t allow you to use the notation platform for several hours at a time. Several times I have been writing a very long and detailed chart note and will click ‘View Chart Note’ and get an error code and nothing was saved.
3. The navigation is very slow so I don’t know whether they are running updates or the server is just slow.

Pros

The e-prescribing module is the most user-friendly part of the EMR. It isn't great, however. It would be better if it would save prescription that were pending signature for signing later.

Cons

The frequent downtime, slowdowns and bugs are the #1 headache of being a DrChrono end user. Yesterday it ran so slow for 6+ hours that it was impossible to send controlled substance prescriptions. It was almost impossible to save notes. Appointment weren't getting saved to the schedule. It would take on the order of minutes to open a note. There are other glitches, like appointment reminders getting turned off, buttons disappearing, and new diagnoses getting added to patient charts. For example, many of my patient charts were automatically updated with diagnoses of ADHD and schizophrenia. There are lots of other quirks and problems: if you delete an appointment from the calendar, the note disappears from the chart. The chart shouldn't be that fragile!

Pros

Its easy to navigate and self teach without calling support constantly

Cons

Support takes FOREVER to get back on a ticket

Pros

Nice to use and easy to navigate. The differences between this softwear and others are easily noted

Cons

Scheduling difficulties can make it hard sometimes

Pros

The company itself is such a disaster to work with that it would matter if these guys could cure cancer, I still wouldn't work with them. They are the bottom of the barrel of humanity. Utterly disgusting people.

Cons

The company itself. The staff, the managers and most likely all the way to the top. I dont know how they sleep at night. Every employee ought to be ashamed to work for such a dishonest company!

Pros

Nothing. I can't use this system with ease and will be happy to be done with it at the end of the year.

Cons

Setting appointment profiles, setting up note templates, having to search for my customized templates when I go to create a note. I counted... it takes NINE clicks to create a locked note.

Pros

Very customizable. User friendly. Cost effective.

Cons

Occasionally, it takes support a longer time than desired to resolve an issue. However, they do respond quickly and any issues/questions I have had have been minor.

Pros

The sales pitch is great but none of the functions that we use work well, work consistently or work as you would expect.

Cons

Getting to an old note without modifying it is near impossible. Getting to the list of vital signs of a patient from a closed chart requires first going into the demographics page. Nothing is easy or natural to find. Where do I find lab results? Oh, might be under lab order, or incoming faxes, or documents. Labs are ordered old to new so once I click I then have to scroll to the bottom of a page to find last weeks labs. Click away and back then restart the process. I just put in a controlled script and got an error, "couldn't contact escripts", put in again and the pharmacy calls confirming to dispense twice. Controlled scripts go to the pharmacy without making it into the record. Searching controlled scripts given out does not work in any useful way. Text reminders can be set but half the time they don't go out. Patients complain they didn't get a reminder and appointments are missed. Try to collect a late fee on a patient who didn't get a reminder on her 5th appointment but got one for the last four. Many times we are unable change a patient status from "checked in" to "in room". Nobody realizes the program glitched and the patient complains they were in the room forever. The way the templates work seems great but they cannot be edited on the fly. Slider ON = "uneditable text into the chart here". Not every patient fits in the cookie cutter. Nice kiosk sign in concept but always breaking and leaving patient data visible to the next patient in line.

Pros

I have been using the program for 5 years. Once I had my templates in place and understood the very quirky way this program builds and imports the note from the multiple page boxes which can be clicked on to create the note, I was able to use the system in a functional way that will create a thorough note which looks legally presentable. However, if you intuitively use the boxes they have set up to create and import information into your note, you will see a great deal of unnecessary information imported into your notes and you will legally be in trouble, as it will include things that you not only did not examine, but that are unnecessary to be in your notes. This makes you seriously susceptible to lawsuits and legal action against you. But if you learn how the system imports information and create all your own templates, and you DO NOT click on their boxes, you will be fine, as the information will be only what you require and what you have deemed necessary in the notes.

Cons

The program glitches and freezes frequently. They are constantly doing maintenance on the program, which creates days of very slow use and function. The program frequently fails to save information you have entered or edited, which can get you in real legal trouble. If you are not paying attention, a great deal of information may be missing from your notes due to these glitches and system failures. Unfortunately, once you are invested in a program, it is a real hassle to switch, as many of us know. So I suffer through these issues, understanding that in 5 years of use, the problems have not improved-they've actually worsened.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing DrChrono

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to DrChrono

Pros

Simple to get up and running. You can send automated appointment reminders via text, in Spanish. And when you type in a patient's address, you can type in the ZIP code, and it fills in the City and State for you.

Cons

It just seems like they're not ready. Like they put the product out before finishing it. Yes, they HAVE certain functionality, but does it work like it's supposed to?

I've had many problems since I signed up in December of 2013, but this one is particularly revealing:

DrChrono has a way for doctors to receive electronic refill requests, which is great. But when we started using it, we discovered that when we refilled prescriptions in this way, once it was sent, there was no record of it ever happening. No record whatsoever. Of a doctor refilling a prescription. No date. No medication name or dosage or number of refills. The whole thing would just vanish. The only confirmation we could get was by calling the pharmacy by phone and writing in the paper charts that we still had to maintain because drchrono can't track what doctors need to track. I made them aware of this issue in April of 2014. May, I followed up, no response. June I followed up, no response. DECEMBER rolls along, and I got an email saying:

"Thank you for your patience as we've worked to investigate the issue you had reported about medication not getting added after the refill request is approved. We don't currently have a timeframe we can provide regarding when a solution will be available but did want to let you know that it is still on our radar and that as soon as we have an update to share, we'll be certain to let you know."

It wasn't until February 2015 that I finally got an email saying they fixed it. Maybe it's fine now, I don't know because I don't trust them to handle my practice.

I don't usually go into detail like this when I write reviews, but I'm hoping that this experience illustrates the central problem with drchrono. They are software developers with little experience in actually running a medical practice. Ask any experienced medical biller that has used DrChrono for billing, and they will tell you all the BASIC things that are missing from a billing software.

Historical patient eligibility. Meaning, DrChrono doesn't keep track of what insurance a patient USED to have, only what they have now. So when you're looking at a previous claim details, it looks as if it was paid by the patient's CURRENT payer, not the payer that ACTUALLY paid it. And with all the changes that are happening with Medicare, and Obamacare, it's crucial to keep track of things correctly because a patient's coverage can change month-to-month.

Recording prescriptions given through the software... correctly recording payments received through the software. These are BASIC elements of running a practice. And DrChrono is clueless.

Pros

I like the ability to chart from my iPhone. I can do the entire patient encounter, including posting of codes this way.

Cons

1. They increse the cost without warning or new contract. I’m not sure if it’s legal, but it sure is annoying and seems unethical. It’s getting to be too expensive for what they offer for us. 2. The online scheduling is not very good for us because we have different providers that offer different services as well as different locations. We used to use a free online scheduling software for patient bookings and it was 10 times better.

Pros

[SENSITIVE CONTENT] presented DrChrono as a great software for our new, small mobile medical business. However, one month into our 12-month contract, that all went out the window. The product NEVER worked for our business as described. We didn’t even get out of the “product training” before we ran into some issues. Admittedly, one issue was on our side, but the rest was on DrChrono. [SENSITIVE CONTENT] did offer a 2-month credit, but when the issues got more serious and we realized we were not able to use DrChrono, it was radio silence from everyone for months. After repeated emails asking for support, we received an email from "[SENSITIVE CONTENT], here at DrChrono" with a bill for the cancellation fee of the full monthly amount for the remainder of the year, plus one of the months they “credited”. DrChrono expects us to pay for a full year of service without ever being able to use their service for a single day!

Cons

They're very expensive, especially when most functions of the software will not work in the field (at least for our mobile biz) and if you want anything to work in the field, you must have the most current and expensive Apple (IOS) products to run the app for each one of your people in the field. For us, that was not attainable and of course these important details were not disclosed to us before we signed a year contract with them. They offered no support by phone and eventually none by email either. Any questions we had, no matter the urgency, could only be submitted by email and it would take at least 3 days for someone in India to email back with a non-applicable/non-helpful answer.

Pros

Patient reminder system and appointment scheduling.

Cons

Many promises were made prior to going on board and I was highly excited about getting up and going. There was a lot of difficulty reaching technical support for immediate and not so immediate issues. My staff had to spend many man hours to get the proper paper work for billing of Medicare once we found out that they were dragging their feet. We could no longer wait on them getting everything in order. The issue with Medicare still has not been completely resolved to date and Medicare is one of our major carriers. Had we not intervene the present progress would not have been made. There were numerous emails and telephone calls placed only to get the usual response that they were sorry for the inconvenience and would solve the issues. You can believe that there were no problems charging the credit card on a monthly basis. The initial monthly contract agreement increased substantially and the service never came up to par. I am totally disappointment in the company and will not be renewing my contract. Ample time was given to vent my frustrations on the phone and at the end of the conversation I would be told the usual which is that they would resolve the issues. I can honestly say that that Drchrono has caused us a lot of frustration, valuable time and waste of my money. Like others have mentioned Buyer Beware.

Pros

It is very customization, more than nearly any other option, although there are a few limitations. The clearinghouse is built into the software, which is their best feature. It is easy to use and new providers can be trained in hours (that is correct).

Cons

Billing is not as easily accessible as other areas (a few more clicks than is needed). Logs for lab specimens needs improvement. It needs to be programmed to be used (it is not like an iphone where you are good to go right out of the box). There is downtime that slows or stops practice up to 15 minutes every 3-12 weeks, which is awful. Support is not readily available as it used to be.

Pros

The Gyn chart is not terrible, it is usable if you use yearly exam for everything otherwise, med, allergies, surgeries do not carry over
I pad voice recognition is fair

Cons

OB chart is dangerous, you would have to look in 10 places to get a picture of what is going on, no problem list no flow sheet

Pros

Advanced Reports .

Cons

Ineffective and laughable support team and ticket system, dysfunctional patient reminder system, multiple unaddressed bugs in the system, unapologetic lack of urgency, and complete lack of communication.

Pros

Had a ton of functions and as a chiropractor we ran into way too many options built for a medical practice. It made it to clustered and too many choices to sift through to find what you need.

Cons

It was clunky and hard to use and train new staff on

Pros

Easy navigation, excellent customer service! The team is always finding ways to make keep customers happy while providing excellent customer service. Also, problem solving skills are A +++. Following up on matters are also handled in a timely manner as well. I can definitely say they are on top of things. I always reefer new clients or practices to them as I know they hae a great reputation and awesome people skills.

Cons

No Cons here. But there is always room for improvement. If i can say one thing regarding improving I can say perhaps follow up speeds? Even though they are awesome at following up already. Every time I called to reach out or they followed up first I can definitely picture the friendly person i'm talking to has a huge smile on their face which is not really a con but I wanted to just throw that out there . :)

Pros

The salesperson was very good, but was not accurate on what the functionality of DrChrono.

Cons

Customer support was absolutely horrific. We had many questions and issues and put in help tickets with screen shots and emails from patients about issues accessing the scheduling function, medical forms, and not being able to checkin online. All of these tickets were marked as resolved even though nothing was resolved despite submitting more tickets for the same issues. All we were told was that it looked fine on there side and there was no problem. After six months of trying to get all of this fixed and functional it was never fixed. The only thing that was consistent is them taking my payment. You will have to sign a contract and we would have had to go to court to get out of the contract that they were on breach of and we determined it was cheaper to pay them then fight it. We paid six months and did not use them and I glad to be rid of them.

Pros

I like how easy it is to find my ICD10 codes with this software. You can submit the codes right from the software.

Cons

Some of the settings are hard to find but once you get it setup it runs smooth and makes billing and coding easy.

Pros

Scheduling part and ability to store reports

Cons

Inability to talk to a person or directly email a person. Even the chat feature is automated. About to have to close my companies doors because of the economy, and have been trying for almost 6 months to get out of my contract (I’ve been in for 10 years), and during the attempts, they renewed my contract for another year and are saying I need to pay another year’s fees to cancel. I can barely make ends meet and I’m the only one working here and I cannot cancel…

Pros

I like the set of features they have - compliant to data safeguarding standards, managing historical customer medical history, effective scheduling and management of appointments

Cons

The cost is high, integration of several tools is complex, the sync is missing. Complex to use overall

Pros

I absolutely love charting, creating shortcuts for patient education, sending prescriptions and reviewing my patient's medical history.

Cons

Medical billing has to go. We are not making any money at all using this system because the billers just are not understanding the health insurance companies pay out their medical claims. And so until the billers are located here in the US with prior experience in collecting claims from our insurance companies - Dr. Chrono will not be sustainable.

Pros

Once I have used it I can navigate easily. I am srtill learning but it has been working great!

Cons

There really isn't anything I dislike. It's just learning everything. I do wish they had a user guide.

Pros

Not one damn thing. Terrible. Horrible. DO NOT BUY!!!!

Cons

EVERYTHING. ZERO ACCESS to SUPPORT. THEY DO NOT VALUE THEIR CUSTOMER. MY COLLEAGES FEEL THE SAME AND HAVE LEFT. I AM LEAVING TOO. UGH!

Pros

Web based and ipad/phone app seemed easy to access

Cons

Oh where to begin on this? Endless runaround from start to finish - just scheduling a call with someone to help set up things took a month. Then they say I needed to go through enrollment, which makes sense but this was never discussed a month prior. Then there were some issues on the backend with enrollment process which no one got back to me on. Essentially paid for 3 months of "service" with zero to show for it, complete waste of time for myself and the rest of my group. I can't believe this product is as highly rated as it is, the customer service is beyond bad. EMR is just OK, a little clunky to put in notes, it appeared to be a glorified spreadsheet on top of a data backend.

Pros

The accessibility on checking schedules and creating one. You can also add task and make communication logs.You are also able to upload documents of patients in chart.

Cons

The loading time.Sometimes it takes time for the tool to load and also if you arw not using it. It automatically log you out in the system and you need to log in again.

Pros

I love how all necessary features were integrated.

Cons

The cost was too much for me per month just getting started.

Pros

Customization is unparallel and cloud based is a bonus.

Online scheduling, self check-in, a HIPAA-compliant patient portal.

Mobile access that is clearly efficient.

Cons

Cost is on the higher end and too many options in one suite.

Pros

Excellent and easy-to-configure views to manage the appointment slots

Cons

There are some constraints when it comes to customizations

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Nothing, everything was terrible. Everything they promised didnt work.

Cons

Horrible customer service. Never fixed our issue and then told us if we canceled we owed them $2k.

Pros

I have been very satisfied with the programs and interface. If is easy to use and intuitive in regard to navigating the software. They have just about everything needed when it comes reports one would need.

Cons

I can't say that I have any. The software and support have been great.

Pros

Customization was nice. Worked well for integrated practice.

Cons

Customer service and automatic 1 year renewals without out option to get out of contract.

Pros

Ease of use for documentation of progress notes.

Cons

Billing payment sometimes lags. Although it has improved significantly in the past few weeks.

Pros

Complex but Flexible> It Has a wonderful User experience and the user interface is easy to navigate.

Cons

Occasionally slow maybe due to network.

Pros

superbill is pretty easy to useI liked the patient reminder options

Cons

The customer service is really bad. I've emailed them 6 times to close out of my practice (I moved away) & I still haven't gotten any of this service. The templates are annoying to make

Pros

Theoretically DrChrono offers a comprehensive product with all the features you would want under one roof. It was easy to learn how things are supposed to work. The UI is not too visually cluttered.

Cons

It doesn’t work as promised. When something is broken, the help desk first gaslights you,, trying to convince you that it’s not broken or that it’s your fault it’s broken. Sometimes tickets are open for a month or two before they even acknowledge that it’s broken. They don’t reliably notify the larger DrChrono community of system level problems. The status page with system uptime statistics is a lie. It presently boasts 100% up time in the last 30 days, but on 11/3/22, the system was so slow it was unusable. We cancelled patients and sent admin home because we had no access to charts, as did multiple of my colleagues using DrChrono.Also read your contract with a lawyer. The sales person will promise you the moon, and there will be things that seem like common sense, but if it’s not in the contract, they won’t honor it.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to DrChrono

Pros

User interface loos pretty and enticing. That is all. Nothing else.

Cons

Extremely buggy and slow. ICD and CPT codes does not accept synonyms. It only accepts exact wording of used in original CPT and ICD-10 code. I had to use google all the time to find appropriate codes to put in the charts. Takes double the time. Billing is horrendous. No way to track if payment is received and processed. When more than thousands of payments are hanging, it becomes impossible to track anymore. Finally I had to decide to stop using and give up tracking the account receivable and give up insurance payment all together for many months. It was worth to give up months of work than further loosing and not being able to collect anymore. Lessons learned in hard way.

Finally, when I moved to different EHR after using Dr.Chrono for 4 years, they refused to transfer patient data. Instead, they told us to manually open and download individual items from patient charts or pay them $50 per month for read only version. The new EHR company contacted them to work through, they refused all the cooperation. One year later, I still did not receive any patient data. I complained to Better Business Bureau. I am taking legal action against them now.

They will take patients information as hostage. STAY AWAY. These are scammers.

Pros

I thought the scheduling was the easiest part of Dr.Chrono, but that doesn't compare to how money-hungry the company is.

Cons

Prospective customers should know that while it is state law that the doctor maintain the records for a certain number of years, that if you decide, like I did, to leave DrChrono, they refuse to give you future access to any of your medical records. Once my subscription expired they locked me out of the entire system. There was no way to look up any record that I had written. When I mentioned this to the account rep that by law we are required to maintain record for a minimum of 7-10 years he said “you just have to sign up for another year, and pay in full, if you want access to your records, otherwise you are locked out of all of it." I find this practice, along with many of the DrChrono business practices, very suspect. They use ’strong-arming’ techniques to get you to sign their contract. Once you have a signed contract they can ‘at-will’ raise your subscription price. As the rep told me “our board of directors want to see more revenue coming in so they have decided the new prices, and they take place immediately.” They promise you iPads and discounts on your subscription in exchange for reviews, testimonials, and referrals. When you give them the aforementioned review—as I did above—and referrals they claim you didn’t give the referral or review (even though you have to provide them the link to the online published review) so that they don’t have to provide the promised iPad or subscription discount.
This company operates on a bait-and-switch policy. Stay away!
Dr. Loui

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to DrChrono

Pros

It has a visually pleasing interface. There is otherwise very little about this software that I like. I have wanted to switch systems almost since we signed on, but it's such a hassle to switch EHRs that I've kept using drchrono despite hating the product, the company and their horrible support. I've finally reached the last straw, and we are going to switch.

Cons

Almost everything else. Almost every time I wrote to the company with a problem, their answer (when I finally got one, which takes forever) was initially to blame me and my staff, followed finally by an admission that we weren't doing anything wrong, but that their product didn't currently have those features or didn't work that way. The way the product works also puts you at very high risk for data loss, which has happened to us multiple times. There is no local storage of the data, so if you lose internet connectivity after writing a big section of a note, your changes will all be lost. This, of course, is a stupid way to design EHR software.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to DrChrono

Pros

It is 100% cloud based and ability to use iPAD

Cons

After DrChrono 10 years of service, you'd expect certain abilities to be fully functional.
- Filing claims is a nightmare. Every time we load up the CPT codes, i get ERROR SAVING and then we have to start all over again. We spent the last 6 months asking for resolution, no luck. They say we are the only one who has that problem. It is cloud based, not sure why it would be on end when 4 different computers in 3 different zip codes give the same error. Every claim has to be redone over and over before we get through.
- They don't have any trouble charging the credit card monthly, but we have asked to speak to a manager numerous times, and six month later, we still don't seem to get one to call us back.
- When you batch a claim before SUBMITTING to insurance, the CASH patients are mixed with the insurance ones, making it exhausting to filter through one by one. They don't have the ability to separate the two. Other EHRs we used didn't have that issue.
- They don't have the ability to FLAG you when you do not meet the minimum time requirements on certain modalities. Other EHRs would flag you before you sign off the notes.
- Certain important features available in the Desktop are not in the ipad or iphone, the most basic one of sending a prospective new patient a link to get onboarded.
- A lot of ERRORS when doing real time eligibility checks, we constantly have to reach out and ask them to fix it.
- These are just few of the long list of issues.

Pros

1. It has a very elegant and eye pleasing layout which is the main reason I believe I tried this software. Navigating through the system is overall intuitive and generally easy to use.

2. It has a great functionality with the IPAD and that is why it has been awarded the best system on the IPAD. I don't even use my lap top to see patients. I use my iPad and then I supplemented this with my lap top. Most functions that are done on the laptop can be done on the iPad. This includes setting electronic prescription. In fact, some things are better done on the iPad such as reviewing the records and chart.

3. Electronic prescription is easy.

4. The system has a great fax capability with ability to fax almost from any screen and to fax most documents.

5. Dictation: The interface with dragon is decent although could be better compared to other EMR. The M-mode dictation that comes with the program is great. While the recognition is slightly below dragon, the M-mode dictation has the advantage of being portable as it is used with the iPhone are iPad. The downside, however, is that he cannot be used on a laptop. However, I really like the M-mode feature and use this more than dragon.

6. Cloud base which can be accessed from anywhere where there is internet and from most devices. ( It cannot be accessed from none appple Smart devices - Smart phones or tablets).

7. Notes and documents are automatically saved in an external third party cloud base ie BOX. This is actually a very good feature as a backup to have a access to our clinical notes and documents. This is of vital importance in cases where access to drchrono is not possible such as going to another system. The downside to this, however, is that certain parts of the chart (phone messages or email messages for example) are not stored in this third party system

Cons

1. Lack of awareness of what a true legal chart is: As much as I like this system, this is the main reason why I may have to leave and find another system. They are totally clueless as to the difference between what a end-user sees in the software and what the complete chart looks like when requested from an outside source. There is a huge difference and the company do not appreciate this difference. If an outside agency (DEA, medical board or an attorney) ask for the complete medical records, the clinical notes and documents stored at the BOX account can be easily exported. However, communications between you and the patient by phone or email are not stored in the box account and not included in this information. When I have spoken with them about this, they inform me that I could simply print each phone or email encounter. This however is completely ludicrous - as in supposed the patient has 100 phone or email encounters.
For unknown reasons, in refilling the same medications from visit to visit, it simply takes it out of the medication list that is generated in the complete dictated notes. This gets very confusing especially for an outside agency that is reviewing the chart. Its is completely confusing as to what medication the patient is taking at the time of the visit. For example, if I have a patient who is on OxyContin 80 mg twice a day, gets a refill on this medication, it takes it off the medication list in the completed dictated note. This creates mass confusion. The way it appears in the signed completed note, is as if this patient was not on any opioids at all, but then all of sudden, I prescribed them a very high dose of 80 mg OxyContin twice a day. (This would be malpractice). This creates absolute confusion especially if my chart is being reviewed by the medical board or the DEA.
Furthermore, the signed dictated note does not include the number of medications prescribed. So for example in the case of this person who was getting OxyContin 80 mg twice a day, the note does not include that the total count of the prescription given such as #60 or #480. This makes a difference to a DEA offcer who is reviewing the records. Again, when I have discussed this with drchrono, they simply state that review of the medication history in the software can tell this information. However, they do not recognize that the only thing an outside chart reviewer has access to is signed clinical notes and not the complete electronic medical records. Again, this shows that they are clueless about difference of what the software end-user sees and what an outside reviewer has access to.

2. Templates are still in their infancy and generally they are limited compared to other EMRS.

3. Customer service: They responded very quickly to support tickets. Generally, if there is an major system wide issue it get results rather quickly. For other issues, it tends not to be resolved in a timely fashion or not at all.

Pros

It is nearly a one stop shop bedside tool for a busy outpatient surgical center. Consent and Data entry is pretty easy. Creating our own templates for nearly the entire process was essential, and we were able to do that with very little help. It's fairly intuitive. There are definitely downsides to creating your own templates (see below). The ability to draw notes and fax notes is excellent, and improvements in fax documentation and signing is indicative of how they try to constantly improve. The different tiers of service offers a slightly clunky fit, though overall it is pretty decent given the fact you mainly have to choose the feature they lay out at each tier of service. Also, there are on line instructions with video for many features, but they often have outdated videos and it's hard to distinguish. They should label each version with the VERSION of Dr. Chrono to which they are doing the training in order to avoid wasting time. The set up is easy. Help for the initial set up is good. They offer good training.

Cons

SERVICE. I can't stress strongly enough how variable the service quality is. There is no way to contact them other than email. You cannot call them. They call back at times when either I'm busy, or after hours. It's as though you can't get anyone or worse since they are at arms length. It makes it VERY difficult to deal with a complex problem. I am more that willing to pay extra for better service with a "phone line" or "hot line" to call. This has been rejected. I don't know why. I find it a poor way to run service for an EHR company.
RELIABILITY: This is a real problem. There are so many breakdowns, inability to use the notes, slow service, etc. We increased our internet speed at work to 15G and it didn't really help other than increase speed when it is working. I do recommend a higher speed as the data is fairly intensive which is a plus for DrChrono - they can accomplish a lot. But the breakdowns have forced us to use paper charting on many occasions. A very recent example is that we could not view a complete not from the iPADS. We could from the computer, but that is NOT how we function, nor should we be expected to function that way. It was resolved in a few hours. The very next day you could not view notes from EITHER the iPAD or the computer. Other issues were consent forms simply dropping off the consent list on the iPAD or being put in reverse order. After many emails, they finally admitted there was a problem. Also, the back and forth creates poor communication when you get a request to take a "screen shot" of a problem that occurred a few days ago. Even then, you are lucky to get an answer other than "we are looking at this".
SALES: Pretty darn good. Just wish they added a service package with a phone line/hot line.