Michael S.

GoodRx.com has saved my patients hundreds of dollars and has saved our practice frustration and phone calls. It is easy to use and provides a much needed service for patients who either have no drug coverage or who cannot get their insurance company to authorize payment for expensive medications. All the major pharmacies participate and on many medications the savings are substantial. I have had patients actually call back in tears thanking me for pointing them to this site.

I've read some of the negative reviews on this site. Let me say I've been using GoodRx.com for personal use as well as recommending it to our patients and have had overall very good results. Not every drug made will have a substantial discount, but many do and many of those that do are ones that are quite commonly used. Also, it is important to know that this discount acts in lieu of insurance, not along side it. If you already have a low copay with your insurance this will not help.

I can't begin to tell you how frustrating it is to use. We are hosted (means the data rests on their servers). We have constant connection problems that they cannot fix. I don't believe it is connections so much as their servers are just overloaded or something like that. All other internet-based apps and connections we use work well. We have tested and retested our connections through our own IT department as well as from our ISP and it always tests out at peak. When you ask for technical assistance the techs are polite but usually very difficult to understand because of thick accents.

It is embarrassing to use this software, making patients wait while we restart it over and over and over again. If we don't restart the application before scanning insurance cards or drivers licenses the system crashes to desktop and we have to reboot the computer before proceeding. They have worked endlessly on this issue without resolution. Even a new computer with a new install did not resolve this and many other issues. Constant FTP server login failures. Freezes, disconnects, crashes to desktop. Productivity suffers a great deal just because of the constant performance failures of this software. Stability rating for this software would be 0 stars if possible.

The interface is clumsy and not very intuitive. In many things the information you need to get to is tucked away in separate screens that cannot be accessed from where you are at that time, forcing you to close down multiple layers of screens. The answer for them is to open another ECW and run two or more at the same time. It's clumsy and could have been avoided if they had thought about work flow when designing. This is just an example but clumsy work-flow is seen throughout much of the design. I would rate the interface at 2 stars.

While writing this review I tried to get a patient checked in and scan his drug card. I restarted ECW before scanning because long, painful experience has taught me never to try without doing so. Even so, on trying to scan the back of the card the software lost connection to the scanner forcing me to restart once again. Without exaggeration I would estimate at least 20 to 40 restarts during an average working day and can be more on heavy days. I would estimate FTP login failures at least at 10 per day.

Overall I would strongly recommend not using this EMR.

01/13/2006 Update:

After the Service Pack update now we have a new issue! It crashes to desktop spontaneously. What makes it even more fun is that if you are in an appointment setting dialog at the time of the crash (like what happened to me this morning) the window is locked for access when you get back so you cannot check the person in or out or update anything within the dialog window. This locking feature is something added with the latest update. It's a good idea since it keeps people from overwriting what you are doing but it's not well thought out. Progress notes are locked in this way as well as appointments. However, the Telephone Encounters are not! This is where we see the most danger of overwrite since Telephone Encounters are the place in each chart that has the most chance of being accessed by more than one person at a time. As per usual, ECW is clunky, not well planned or executed.

3. 17. 16 - It only gets worse. Now it tells me every morning just as we are opening for business that it cannot log into the FTP file server. This has been going on for several days now. Of course, that means no documents or files that rest on the remote server can be loaded. Nice! Please, this software is pure junk. Avoid it if at all possible.

We have been open for 26 minutes and I have restarted ecw 4 times!
8:30 am -- restart number 5! Docs won't attach to DI orders. Worse than usual. Glory! Using rabid hamsters high on meth to work the charts would be a more organized and efficient way of managing charts than ecw!

4. 5. 16 -- I'm on a mission at this point to make sure that anyone thinking of using this software is fully aware of the misery he or she is about to bring down on their selves and those around them. When trying to process an incoming referral there is NO WAY to add a doctor or clinic from the referral source without completely backing out of the incoming referral screens. This is just idiotic. Here you are trying to enter an incoming referral from a doctor or clinic you've not had contact with yet and you are several screens deep in the incoming referral process -- but you cannot add to the practitioner's database from here! You actually have to retreat out of several screens, back to the base ecw to access the practitioner's database and enter that information in, then return to the patient's chart and restart the incoming referral. It is absolutely insane. No designer in his or her right mind would do this.

I think it is VERY interesting that ECW does not have a rep that scans these reviews and replies. Either they just don't care or they are so ashamed of the product that they can't bring themselves to try to defend it.

9/21/16 Edit:
Well, we have been blessed with an update! Now, when one of us is in an encounter and the program crashes (as just happened to me... for the umpteenth time) when I try to get back into the encounter I was working on, I can't because it is "locked" by me! Brilliant!
Please, save yourself, your sanity and your soul by staying as far away from this torturous plague from the pit of hell as you possibly can. It is nothing but frustration. I am now contemplating joining a monastery in order to save what little is left of my emotional health.

Thought: if we would make captured terrorists use this program if they won't talk during interrogation I believe it would be more effective than waterboarding. Just a thought.

Edit 9/27/16
Just adding this to give you an idea of the support issues I've dealt with over the years. When we first got ecw we were able to use the handy little button labeled "Cancel" in the document management screen to cancel faxes from sending if we realized that we had a wrong number or such thing. After an update some time later that button didn't work anymore. We would get an error saying that it could not connect to the fax server. So, I put a ticket into ecw to get it fixed. They worked on this issue for a couple days, with multiple connections to the tech department and several people looking at it. Could not fix it. Gave up on it for a bit then tried again a few months later. Same result. Eventually, after several tickets we were told this function never worked and that it could not be fixed. We were actually told that this was never functional even though I explained that we used to use it! Could get nowhere with them on this issue.

A few days ago our local tech support was in house updating our virus protection. I asked the young lady if she could take a look at this issue. She had it fixed in under 5 minutes.

This is a typical story when dealing with tech support from ecw. Terrible language barriers, lack of knowledge and willingness to fix the issue. I wonder if other EMRs are like this?