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Electronic Medical Records and Billing Software: Or, Why I Hate Salespeople

May 5th, 2009 by Andrew Yates

I run a small medical practice office. I need software. 

But, buying medical software sucks —so much so that the government will pay you $50k to do it. (Yah, does that raise red flags for you, too?)

So, an open memo to electronic medical record and billing vendors:

I don’t want a “relationship” so that you can “help” me “find” a “solution” for my needs.” I want you to show me how your product works in 15 seconds or less after visiting your website. You can convince me that I want to waste the precious hours of my relative youth behind a computer screen, burning your electronic medical record and billing software into my retinas, precisely by the following means as listed in descending order my incurred impatience:

  1. Exactly like this: https://www.getdropbox.com. Note:   
    1. I can register or install the actual product as a demo with one click from the home page.
    2. I can watch a short video of the actual product working on an actual machine.
    3. I can read a brief list of features which include keywords like “Apple” and “Sync” and screenshots of the actual product.
  2. Exactly like this: http://37signals.com

What I don’t want:

  1. photos of smiling people, clouds, and stock models in medical coats with clipboards (i.e. “that guy” from some freelancer’s Art History 201 class that kind of looked like “he could go to medical school”)
  2. electrotronic animations of magic floating globes transported through time by space pixies on the U.S.S Enterprise into the palm of your well-groomed CEO by which he can miraculously summon the cast of Tron to email a call center in Bangladesh to send me a fax announcing that U.S. Social Security Numbers (SSNs) must include exactly one dash between the 3rd and 4th digits and thus I must resubmit my claim, dear Valued Customer
  3. to ever to talk to anybody at your company to learn anything that I want to know about your product until well after I’m a happy, paying customer. Why in the world would I want to juggle faxes from 15 different botpeople relationship executives from 10 different vendors, all pressing me to complete their assinine Solution Management Synergy Requisition Matrix or whatever the hell name you idiots invent to piss me off when I check my iPhone email (I have my faxes sent to email —a necessary hack to keep myself afloat amid the backwash of these obsolete people)

Listen medical software vendors: you are machines that I pay some reasonable monthly fee to solve my problems with my minimal attention. Every time you call my office, I want to not buy your software. Every time you send my office, I want to not buy your software. Every time you make me schedule a remote sales call with a web presentation, I want to not buy your software. And every time you send a sales guy to my office to clutter my nice clean whiteboard with stupid graphs about clouds, feature tables, and capital letters without sitting down on my computer, going to your website, and showing me how you use your software in my office right now, I want to cobble the core functionality of your software in Django or whatever, release it on the web, and cut your projected sales by 2 to 5% so that your company sends you home to “telecommute” and you watch DVD box seasons of Family Guy while surfing for porn on Craigslist from the couch for the next five months.

Oh, and I promised Houston Neal at Software Advice that I would link to his website about electronic medical records when he called the office. I’m hoping by linking to their site that it will help sway his company to publish video screencast demos of installed medical software so that I can pay his company to learn what I want about what I want to buy without ever having to slog through dozens of vendors’ sales trash or schedule calls with their shills just to learn what they have to sell. Houston, I called as “Josh Hill” (sorry Josh) when they spammed Steve at Gene Sherpa and he forwarded the email to me because it described a hypothetical “Mac Tablet” —apropo as I had expressed just the day before that a “tablet-sized iPhone”  would be great for the practice —and I wanted to call for my own curiosity, but since I was calling from the office, I knew that the hospital receptionists would bounce calls for “Josh Hill,” and I hate being called by sales people on the office phone because line that is for patients and medical use only. So, Houston, that’s the story.

But, seriously about those electronic medical record and billing software screencasts —they’d be great.

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