Epic offers a suite of medical practice management and EHR software.
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WellSky Personal Care
Score 8.7 out of 10
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WellSky Personal Care (formerly ClearCare) is an online home healthcare business administration platform. It includes features for scheduling in-home care visits, messaging between patients and caregivers, and marketing caregiving services.
Epic gives extensive customization options in terms of utility and view. I have found this to be highly useful and efficient EHR as compared to other EHRs we use in our organization.
Epic has more features and seems to be used by most hospital systems, which means information can be shared between systems. It is not compatible with Cerner, McKesson, or any other of the less commonly used products and we cannot view information from such facilities. I …
Epic has extensive features, options, customization and is truly a robust EMR software. As a user I can tell there has been much thought and effort into creating this software and they are constantly updating the technology to keep it user friendly. Epic can do more than any …
All of the EHR's I have worked with are strong in their own right, however, Epic really shines in an Enterprise level situation. Most EHR's are specific to one context, like hospital, lab, or clinic. Epic has a great deal of strength in unifying all of these different contexts …
We used Generations scheduling software for about 3 years before switching to ClearCare, and found it to be more robust and more functional in relation to our needs.
ClearCare was recommended by our franchisor. We did not evaluate this product against similar products. It is definitely better than the offline software we were using before.
Others were extremely cumbersome and had many glitches - we could tell horror stories about trying to get payroll and billing done on time, and the difficulty of managing scheduling. Now those things are easy!
Generations was not a great interface, but reporting is much better. The CRM part of all home care software is terrible, but Clearcare is pretty bad overall.
This is a similar system that was created for organizational purposes for health businesses. Ortho2 is not as user friendly and takes much longer to learn the different ins and outs of the software system. I used it for over six years and still did not use all of the features …
We had a locally hosted system. It was not user-friendly. It was not cloud-based. ClearCare makes it easy to see a schedule, contact a client, message a CAREGiver, or do a host of other things from wherever I am connected.
Epic is very good on the medical side and continues improving mental health and dental care. Having integrated telehealth via Zoom was a game-changer. During COVID, it was vital to have telehealth options and to ensure it was completely HIPAA Compliant and easy to document inside their health record.
ClearCare/WellSky is not a software I would go out of my way to endorse. The coding bugs are numerous and fixing those bugs is not at all a priority. Unfortunately, it is still the most robust platform of it's kind - reporting, customization, integrations, automation capabilities, mobile app for caregivers - and with it becoming part of WellSky I am hopeful they will now have the resources to allocate for bug squishing
Managing the scheduling process form the employee and client standpoint. In one screen we can see exactly what is going on with a client. Who's there, when they arrived, when they will be leaving, etc. Plus we can manage up to the minute changes in the care plan, in real time.
Payment processing allows us to bill and initiate client payments with a few clicks. It automatically reconciles accounts receivable. It handles both credit card and ACH payments. Saves a bunch of time.
Background checks are fast and easy because they are integrated into the platform. When a potential employee applies it starts the system begins all the steps in the hiring process. Once they get to orientation and have completed all of the other hiring process steps, with one click we initiate a customized background check that meets our licensing requirements.
ClearCare does experience times when the system glitches. You cannot add or edit shifts, see client or caregiver details, nothing. They don't have anything in place that reassures you that they are aware of the problem and are working to fix it. It doesn't usually happen more than a few times a year, but we rely so heavily on this software for the daily operation of our business that even 15 minutes down can prove to be catastrophic.
You can call tech support, but overall I have found them rather unhelpful. I don't usually stay on hold long enough to get a live person, preferring to send an email if it's not an urgent need. I have been disappointed with the time it takes to resolve issues; the longest I went without a fix was about 8 months. They are pretty slow to change when it's something that has been suggested by the network publically. Moreover, sometimes the changes they implement make things more difficult for us or require features or functionality that we would prefer not to use. For example, they are rolling out a new feature that will allow the caregivers to enter their own availability in the system. We require them to contact the office to change their availability or request time off and plan to do everything we can to keep it that way.
The mobile version of the administrative site is essentially the desktop version, but tiny. When we are out and about after hours, inevitably we use our cell phones to utilize the software. Any shift adjustments are tedious, as the pop-up box moves around whenever you edit a field. To be fair, I'm not sure that the time and energy it would take to redesign the mobile site would be worth it when we still get all the functionality of the full site, even if it is harder to maneuver.
My organization has been using the Epic platform for 10 years and counting! Epic has continuously improved and updated the system to align with current best practices and meet the needs of members and their patients. As an FQHC, we provide medical, dental, and mental health services, and it is essential to have access to all the patients' health information in one place. Integrating Care Everywhere and Telehealth options embedded directly in the EHR has greatly improved our ability to take the best care of each patient who walks through our doors.
I have used ClearCare for about a year now and have only experienced positive outcomes with the system. It has everything you need from simple note reminders to detailed medial information regarding your client. If anyone in the health field takes the time to view this software, they would be hooked.
A dedicated support staff for each module/area is provided by Epic. This is beneficial for points of contact, however, not all support staff are created equal, and there seems to be high turnover in these roles(staff seems to turn over every 1-2 years). This can make it challenging for continuity and quick support resolution as new staff are not as familiar with organization-specific needs, environments, and/or questions.
They are reasonably responsive with simple questions, but when it comes to the software not functioning as expected, resolution is very slow. I had a situation where I would click "cancel" in a scheduling window and it would go ahead and make the change (i.e. I didn't realize a caregiver wasn't actually available or that it would create over time, so I would cancel out of that window to go reevaluate, but when it closed that window, the change would be made regardless). That took 8 months for them to resolve, during which time they released a number of relatively useless updates. Currently, I am waiting for them to fix Safe Mode, which is supposed to give us basic access to personnel and scheduling. A select few clients/caregivers actually show up in this system, rendering it largely useless. I have been waiting since late August without an update or resolution, it is currently mid-February. For software that touts safe mode, I would think they would make sure it's actually functional for all users. They have to advertise it in the network because the software goes down with some frequency, at least every few months.
Epic has more features and seems to be used by most hospital systems, which means information can be shared between systems. It is not compatible with Cerner, McKesson, or any other of the less commonly used products and we cannot view information from such facilities. I believe Epic has the most features. It automatically saves entries, unlike Quadrimed, for example, which does not save and if you accidentally get logged out you lose your information.
This is a similar system that was created for organizational purposes for health businesses. Ortho2 is not as user friendly and takes much longer to learn the different ins and outs of the software system. I used it for over six years and still did not use all of the features in the system
Improved Customer Satisfaction: After the initial implementation phase, I have seen increases in patient satisfaction. This is due to the increased transparency regarding their care as well as an increase in paid claims.
Increased Revenue: In some cases I have seen Medicare denial rates drop from high 80's and 90's down to single digits. I have seen incredible jumps in the time payment is received from an approved claim.
POSITIVE IMPACT: We can access almost any metric related to the business and build reports that allow us to set goals, identify potential issues, maintain oversight, and automate workflows with the report scheduling
NEGATIVE IMPACT: We've been dealing with the same software bugs for over 5 years now, they slow productivity, create room for user error, require workarounds to be created, you name it, just a lot of work to make the platform's shortcomings better since they refuse to do it for us
