Behavioral Health EMR 2020
Struggling Market Sees Some Changes in Satisfaction

Qualifacts customers report greater follow-through from executives and feel it has resulted in decreased support response times (due to a new ticketing system), more proactive communication regarding updates and system downtime, and better delivery of new technology. While Qualifacts still has trouble hitting promised timelines, customers are generally optimistic Qualifacts will continue to improve (100% would buy the product again). Areas in which customers would like additional improvement include all-inclusive pricing (rather than ad hoc costs), reporting consistency, and integration. Core Solutions customers are also seeing more executive involvement—the vendor brought in a third party to improve their problematic implementations, and lingering implementation issues are being addressed via an increased focus on customer support. While execution is not perfect, customers are cautiously optimistic Core Solutions is moving in the right direction.

Credible’s software is the highest performing fully rated product that KLAS measures in the behavioral health EMR segment. This is especially notable given the significant server outage that occurred in the latter half of 2019, which many interviewed customers (who are mostly small to midsize organizations) attribute to the influx of new customers created by Credible’s rapid growth. Customers praise Credible for communicating frequently and effectively during the outage. Still, multiple respondents say the outage caused significant disruption and has shifted Credible’s focus from delivering new technology to fixing bugs and downtime. Many customers are confident that Credible will soon return to providing requested enhancements (e.g., improved mobile functionality, improved reporting, and two-way communication with patients in the portal).

While support is a weak spot for many vendors, most interviewed users of Cerner Millennium Behavioral Health (a 2020 KLAS Category Leader) report timely, responsive support from behavioral health–specific resources. Cerner customers—many of whom are hospitals or health systems—are the most likely to say their vendor supports their integration and interoperability goals, and a few praise Cerner for partnering, listening to needs, and then updating the software. Implementations and training are some of the more pressing issues reported by Cerner clients (though they are also a pain point across the market). Three of the five interviewed organizations who have deployed Millennium within the last two years report a poor implementation experience, and some customers had to redo the Cerner training or provide their own because Cerner’s was inadequate or ineffective. Additionally, over half of respondents say the product lacks some behavioral health–specific workflows and functionality, especially for the outpatient setting. Customers report that going forward, Cerner does not plan to develop Community Behavioral Health (Anasazi). 80% of organizations still on this product plan to move to a different solution; most plan to migrate to Millennium.