ConnectWise PSA (formerly Manage) is a business management platform for companies that sell, service, and support technology. The platform is cloud-based and integrates automation, help desk and customer service, sales, marketing, project management, and business analytics. It is the hub of the ConnectWise suite.
$35
Per Tech Per Month
eClinicalWorks
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
eClinicalWorks headquartered in Westborough offers their EHR / EMR solution, which can be upgraded to a full practice management solution at higher pricing tiers.
MSPs wanting to find a single system to fill all their needs. Businesses wanting to increase their ability to deal with tickets, with advanced management and KPI monitoring. Small IT business who need more than just a ticketing system and are looking to make the leap to a full PSA with integration options, client portal and advanced configuration.
eClinicalWorks should be used in most medical situations. The program generally speaking works the way it should keeping track of patient records and the like. They have recently added an inpatient module for ASCs. Seems to work pretty well for smaller practices that don't require a lot of additional features or integrations.
Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon.
Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA.
One of the strengths of ECW can also be a weakness depending on the user's perception. ECW has a lot of redundancies. There are multiple pathways to perform a task. It can be appealing to advanced computer users because of the versatility. I have found that it tends to confuse lesser experienced computer users.
The creation of templates is very easy and any provider in our system can create one. It definitely makes documentation more efficient. By creating a set of templates for the clinic, we are able to standardize the orders/procedures along established guidelines.
We have converted our scheduling to open access. ECW allows us to set the follow up time and the end of the visit and then an alert is created. Front office staff can run the report and schedule patients closer to the actual time. It has improved our no show/cancellation rates.
I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work.
A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature.
Better Knowledge base section.
We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation.
Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help.
A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have.
The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them.
Meaningful Use Reports should be capturing data in real time and generated fairly quickly instead of the MAQ dashboard extraction process.
Their support teams are not very helpful at certain topics such as the definition/logic of Meaningful Use calculations. These are generally difficult to determine but several cases in regards to Meaningful Use take several days before it gets addressed.
Training videos would be helpful on their support website.
ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.
If we had an option to easily switch to another EMR product we would. However, an EMR keeps you invested solidly in it - once you've started you're then going to be stuck with it. The investment into the data in the system are such that you have no real option to back out of what you are in and move into something else. Again, if we could, we would immediately move to another EMR. The ability to use it and be supported by the vendor has decreased nearly to the point of inability to use.
I have been using ConnectWise since 2004 and I am impressed with the progress they have made. However, there are still bugs that don't work quite like they should. If I were to run reports and get consistent answers along with a couple other annoyances, then I would score CW as a 10
[In my opinion] the features allowed by the system are not designed for providers. [I think] the systems are inefficient, and new features tend to be "bolt on" features either as products purchased and added from other providers or simply a module created and strapped onto the software. There doesn't seem to be much idea around making things easier for the provider, though they like to state that provider burnout is something they are working on.
We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.
Some tab for certain areas load speeds could be better. Dashboards can load slowly when they reference multiple reports. Some reports can load slowly based on the tables and views they are accessing. At times the SQL queries being performed in the background can actually timeout and a tab or screen will fail to load.
I often cannot assign a proper diagnosis under the assessment section; and as mentioned, sometimes (about once a month) the dictation just freezes because "the request has timed out" (even restarting the iPhone/ laptop does not help).
The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."
You put in support cases through a support portal. [I believe] for no apparent reason, the company decided that their support cannot have access to actual patient records and as a result, it's required that they have to connect remotely to a computer system in our network, and log in as one of our users to do anything. This also entails that they are completely incapable of diagnosing problems and require significant amounts of user input and time to try and begin any sort of work on the problems. [In my opinion] this takes away from patient care and other concerns. Also, while you can put in as detailed a ticket as you want, when you are called, you have to go over the ticket again, as they don't seem to read or care what you put in, as it's more important to them to go over everything in painful detail. Often times you must explain to the tech how the process works. In the past month, we were upgraded overnight with zero warning, which caused issues the following day as we had to update every single computer in our network (over 300) and it requires administrative privileges so couldn't be done by a user. This also doesn't update any information in the programs list, so there's no way to tell whether the update happened or not.
Paid for training, did not help. They trained prior to go-live, but it was so long ahead that users weren't able to function well when it actually happened, they seemed unable to provide adequate support. [In my experience] further support is typically very boilerplate, and is thus not useful, and has additional cost.
We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.
Rather than letting them sell you a block of time for implementation, create a list of things that must be completed do declare the implementation complete. The implementer will have the discretion on what they set up and in what order. They will be trying to end their services in as little time as possible and may not get things set up right. You are best advised to hire a third-party wizard that has done many of these setups. Record the audio and video of all of your implementation sessions.
It's very important to limit your schedule during the weeks after go live but it is equally important to have a resource that is the lead at the practice that ensures that milestones are met leading up to the go-live date. Someone must be the point person at the practice otherwise milestones will be missed and the implementation will run into problems.
Everyone but dynamics had holes in it. Dynamics is good, but it requires more development time. I spoke with some people that have CW and liked it. But when I inquired after our frustrations, I discovered they had a full time scheduling & logistics CW manager and the field people were using it purely like any other more simplistic ticket system. They said it would be impossible otherwise. The one big difference is the transparency of the sales effort. The other sales people were honest on the limitations or potential challenges and worked with us. They also worked with our agenda. At CW they don't have that option. The consulting time is eaten through a pre-formatted agenda which they communicate too you, not with you.
I was attracted by the final note format of ECW. I said then and still say that most EMR's clinical notes are terrible to try to read and follow in orderly fashion by comparison...BUT the devil is in the data entry and that is where "you live" as a clinician. Incredibly frustrating software because of inflexibility and restrictions of multi level data fields that can only be opened one at a time (i.e. no "toggling" between windows... ooen read and close...then reopen other data entry window....then close and repeat if you need to refer back to original window of data. This applies throughout the software and is due to its reliance on SQL architecture from what I have been told). Kills productivity.
ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.
I will just share one area that our organization saw the ROI in a very short time period. That is the elimination of a dictation service for most of our specialty group doctors when we introducec Dragon Medical. This functionality brought a tangible benefit and a significant ROI in a short time period.
