AVOID: Decades out of date, nickel and diming and more manual work.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Athena IDX as our source of truth for patient demographics. This is a mistake, as their system is built on the antiquated software that is incapable of handling lower cased letters as well as spaces after commas or anything that has been standard per the US Postal Service for the past two centuries or so (EX: 123 Anywhere Lane, Townsville NY 12345 isn't possible because their system cannot handle lower case letters, spaces after commas, etc. due to the archaic language that it's built upon (MUMPS, first developed in 1966, last updated in 1995).
Pros
- The program is aesthetically acceptable
Cons
- Cannot scale. This system was originally built for use within a hospital mainframe and has limitations baked in as a result. Modern reporting is nearly impossible due to the nonsensical data structure required by the ancient (by computer standards) 1970s era bones of the backend. This is uniform throughout the system.
- Must have technical staff versed in what's essentially a dead programming language, MUMPS (created in 1966 and last updated in 1995), to make meaningful changes to customization. Permissions are extremely granular with no way to make changes across multiple permissions. Meaning if a person cannot see an item on a dropdown menu, or if a new dropdown menu is added, it then has to be added manually to every single other permission that you'd like that menu to appear in. This is naturally a big opportunity for errors to occur and is also a problem that has been solved in even 1990s era software.
- Support is lacking and setup staff don't put effort into making sure that the system is set up in a way that makes sense. Staff are happy to present entry tables with duplicate fields, fields that will give an error that gives no information as to what needs to change for the error to go away (quite literally '???'), fields that are laid out nonsensically. Example: The USPS address format: address, city, state, zip? No, they'll be scattered across the fields with city and state somehow combined into one field. Staff will present this to you as normal and how things should be structured despite two centuries of USPS address structuring precedent.
Return on Investment
- Extremely expensive software for the limited feature set. We're talking millions of dollars with off hours support (anything outside of 8-6EST) that starts at $1200 for the first hour and $300 for each hour afterwards.
- Multitasking isn't a thing unless you assign more licenses (thereby increasing your costs). Users can quite literally only have one IDX window open at a time unless you assign more licenses. This slows down everyone as there are plenty of times where examining different parts of a patient's profile is useful.
- Reporting has been nearly impossible as we use modern reporting software. IDX's analytics site is firmly stuck in the 1990s and lacks decades of innovation present in something like Power BI.
- Nickel and diming philosophy. A limited API server costs ~$10k/month. Setting up a new facility in IDX costs you and requires a 4 month lead time. Many more instances of this.
Alternatives Considered
Centricity Clinical Archive, Unlimited Financials, Epic, CareCloud and Dentrix
