One HIT Vendor's Perspective

As many of you know, I live in a rural Northern Minnesota town called Hibbing. You may have heard of it as the boyhood home of Robert Zimmerman, who later went on to fame as Bob Dylan. Hibbing is interesting in many ways, and with this being HIT week, you would be surprised to hear that it is home to a Behavioral Health EHR Vendor! IRCS, Inc is a popular Minnesota vendor for behavioral health and I had the pleasure of working with them a few years ago on a couple of projects. Interestingly, they are the only EHR vendor that I know of that has completely re-written their software from the ground up using new development tools! That was an expensive, but wise move that has enabled them to provide cutting edge software via the cloud. This allows them to provide their software to very small offices as well as large centers.

I have invited Chris Freeman, Chief Operations Officer at IRCS, Inc. to discuss their perspective to support issues. This is a topic I often discuss (see my webinar “Vendor Issues Management”) and I think it is important to consider the perspective of the vendor using a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need model:

At the core is the requirement to sustain the business and avoid liability that could destroy the business. Next is having a profitable business, and that requires keeping and adding customers. Finally, they want to engage their employees and make a difference in the healthcare community they serve. They can’t do any of that stuff at the top with a failing business! It is important to keep this in mind when you wonder why your support issues have not been resolved as quickly as you think they should be!

Now I would like Chris to discuss the perspective of IRCS, Inc. when it comes to support and product maintenance. Take it away Chris!

IRCS, Inc has been in business since 1982 (33 years), and has been primarily focused on Behavioral Healthcare EHR software for the last 20 years.  Our software, Vireo, which Joe refers to in his introduction, is a brand new software, written from the ground up using new development tools.  Vireo was Stage 2 MU certified on Jan 30, 2014 and we were the 3^rd organization (with the 5^th software application) certified.  We believe that communication between the vendor and the customer is of primary importance.  We commonly answer phone calls directly from our customers (no complicated phone system to get stuck in here), so that is generally how an issue starts its life.   I will now share some tips (that dovetail with Joe's webinar “Vendor Issues Management”) to help your vendor get your issues solved in the least time possible.

Issue life cycle:

1) Issue begins life by either a phone call discussion or email.   A tracking ticket is produced to track the issue.

2) We attempt to reproduce the issue.  If the issue contains enough specific information for us to reproduce the issue, we will typically correct the issue within our development environment immediately.  Following that the issue will be corrected in the next release.  For critical issues, we will issue a hotfix. 

3) If the issue does not contain enough information for us to reproduce, we loop back to the customer in an attempt to obtain that information.   This step is what takes the longest amount of time, usually due to scheduling problems (on both the customer and vendor sides).  If we are unable to reproduce the issue or the root cause cannot be identified the issue is canceled.  If we obtain enough information and are able to reproduce the issue we loop back to step #2.

With any vendor, if you want your support issues corrected in the least amount of time possible, do the best you can documenting how to reproduce the issue.  Typically this takes a subject matter expert on the part of the customer, as a normal user does not have the time and/or big picture knowledge to document the information required.   If you do not have any subject matter experts on staff, you need to develop them, as it is our experience that you cannot completely utilize a software application without them.

Variables to document:

1. Type of device and operating system (i.e. Laptop running Windows 7 Professional vs iPad running iOS 9.0.2) and web browser in use (i.e. Firefox 41 vs Chrome 45 vs Safari 8.0.8).
2. User logged in.
3. Release of software in use and Date and Time issue occurred.
4. Steps to reproduce the issue.

If you follow the steps I have outlined above you will give your vendor enough information to be able to reproduce the issue, and your issue will be solved in the shortest time possible.

Thanks Chris! It is great having someone discuss openly how to best communicate issues to a vendor.