Valant.io

I work for a practice that has 45 clinicians (counselors, social workers, & psychologists). The practice uses Valant as our EHR/EMR and this past year the quality of the user experience has seriously suffered. If you're considering subscribing to this service, I would highly recommend you look at other solutions. When it's working Valant is a decent EHR – I'd rate it at 4/5 when it's working.

If you do decide to move forward, be prepared for updates that are moved into production in the middle of the day, being on hold for 30+ minutes waiting for someone in customer support to take your call (who are nice if you do get the opportunity to talk with them in person), drafting emails to customer support (because you don't have the time to wait on hold any longer) trying to describe what was previously working before the most current updates were installed, and manually texting out appointment reminders when you figure out why clients forgot about their appointments (and then running a report daily to see if the automated appointment reminders are working again because there's no communication when it was fixed).

If you're on the fence about signing up, ask your sales rep the following beforehand:
- How thorough is your pre-production testing? Can your up-time be validated by an independent third party?
(This could be a tricky question because of what they consider to be critical. To me, critical is appointment reminders, the ability to document appointments, and the ability to schedule.)
- Does Valant do regression testing as part of their change control processes?
- Are there test scripts? Is it automated?
- Are the processes formalized to the point where you can show documentation where associates & their managers have signed off on testing before moving changes to production? What does your root cause analysis process look like when problems slip through? How do you prevent it from happening again? Would you be willing to show me some of the most recent documentation?
- What type of Service Level Agreement (SLA) do you provide?
- How am I compensated when the system isn't working and/or I'm spending time waiting for customer support to answer my call or spending time writing out a support email describing what's not working?
- Does Valant have a manual process they can run to ensure appointment reminders go out no matter what?

Sound technical? It is. If you don't want to find yourself pondering these questions, you're probably better served looking at Valant's competitors.
When they can provide answers to those questions, it might be safe to consider giving them your business.