Our practise uses an EMR application that we have coded ourselves, and Great Plains for accounting/billing. Upon purchase of Great Plains, our consultants integrated it with our EMR application. After the expected  initial issues, it was relatively smooth sailing for a while. Most problems encountered were the result of end user error.

About 6 months ago, our consultants informed us that our version of Great Plains was no longer supported, and to complicate matters, the tax table changes we required could only be obtained via upgrading. So, in a quick fashion, we were upgraded to the latest version, which was a considerable departure from the version we were at. This entailed some significant changes to the application and the integration.

Since this point, we have been having ongoing issues with the integrations running reliably. Each time an issue would crop out, the consultants would come, make some changes, and things would work again for a bit. However, for the past few weeks, nearly every day there were similar problems that prevented our staff from doing their daily duties. Instead, we were dependent on support to come in, do some magic, and get the process in question running to completion.

Today was another one of those days, however, our resident EMR programmer happened to be around, and decided to try a few things. In rather quick fashion, he deduced that a lengthy SQL query was culprit, and that increasing a time out window on the Great Plains software should help the issue. Unfortunately, our consultants did not know how to do that, so he instead changed the query for them, and the problem seems solved.

In the end, the best course of action likely would have been for this SQL query change by our programmer. However, given that it was Great Plains breaking, I think it was completely justified for us to expect our support consultants to identify the cause of the problem, and suggest the solution, especially given that it was ongoing for weeks. This is just another example how tricky life gets when systems integration goes wrong, and why I am very glad we have in house people who can often figure things out that the “experts” can not. Without this programmer on staff, who knows how long this issue would have been drawn out for. As it was, we were beginning to evaluate our options for other Great Plains support.

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