Idexx Laboratories, headquartered in Maine, offers Cornerstone Practice Management Software for veterinarians, aimed at improving operational efficiency and including a wide range of features.
In our experience, the integrated credit card processor breaks far too often which halts our ability as a business to accept deposits and check clients out online. When there is an outage, the only way for the clinic to take payment is by entering credit card data manually which is very time consuming and a poor experience for clients lined up checking out.
It is well suited for larger organizations to remove the need to manually track down where a performance review is at any given time, you can always find where it is in the system. It does require a lot of dedicated support to launch the process so I do not believe it would work as well in smaller organizations where you may not have the extra time or "hands" it takes to build and test the template and process.
Takes annual goals set up at the beginning of the year and puts them in the performance management process for employees to begin their self-evaluations.
Routes from employee, to manager, to second-level manager, to HR, for review and then sends back to all for acknowledgment and sign-off.
It sends out automatic emails prompting everyone included in the process to begin the process, prompt them through the process and emails when the process is complete.
In our experience, some basic functionality requires multiple steps to complete. Would like to see more efficiencies in the core functionality.
ClincHQ provides minimal support to clients. During our service period with ClinicHQ, there were only two employees available to all clients for support. There was no implementation management and support tickets lacked meaningful information and was usually not resolved to our satisfaction. We got most of our support/help with issues from other users in a Facebook group. Clinic HQ stated recently that they have nearly 500 clients. Hiring more employees to provide quality support to clients would be a plus.
Customer Service - Clinic HQ is privately owned. The owner is involved with support and is unprofessional, rude, and openly insulting to clients. In my experience, questions and feedback are taken as personal attacks and the owner attacks back. This has no place in business and is something we could not waste our time on since we have such a busy clinic. The messaging from the owner seems to be take it or leave it. I’ve never worked with a software company that operates this way. Listening to client feedback without taking offense and working with clients as partners would be a much better approach.
ClinicHQ has a dated user interface and could be upgraded to include more efficiencies in the core functionality. However, it is privately owned and it appears unlikely that they can do a major product overhaul/upgrade due to lack of funds.
The process to actually set up the performance management template is more complicated than it should be.
Setting up the performance management task process is also a little complicated. I do not think it is as user-friendly as it could be. It took a lot of assistance from a Cornerstone implementation specialist to get the process set up.
It would be nice to be able to remove some features that are hard coded in the performance management template. We have no need for the Tasks & Targets part of the template, however they could not be removed and really confused our employees.
We selected Clinic HQ as a brand new clinic because to us on paper they had everything we needed to run the business. In actuality, some of the software functionality did not work as advertised, and they lack quality support and support staff. They also seems to be loose with their software development methodology or lack it completely.
The monthly fee is $199 but, in our experience, the costs for the labor/time to resolve issues ourselves or work with support added about $200-$400 more in admin costs per month.
When there was a credit card processor outage, functionality in ClinicHQ was impacted so our clients could not schedule appointments because a deposit was required resulting in lost clients and lost revenue, appointment reminder emails and notifications could not be sent so we had a 10-20% no show rate on those days resulting in lost income, and clients could not pay online prior to check-out and instead had to wait in long lines for a staff member to manually key in their credit card data resulting in a very poor and frustrating client experience.
In our experience, the poor technical support and customer service was stressful and time consuming for our staff. Clinic HQ seems to value their time and costs over their clients’ time and costs. Because software is key to our high volume business and daily operations, we could not continue working with this software provider. Having only 3 U.S. employees to support U.S. clients, having outages of key functionality, and having no funding for major upgrades and new functionality were big drawbacks for us.
I don't have hard numbers, but it saved HR a ton of time from constantly having to track down reviews. When done through the manual process, it could take a full year to get a completed reviews into our HR file.
I was told that this was one of the easiest review cycles the manager has ever experienced at our company.
