DrChrono

So today we’re chatting about DrChrono and how it’s used at your company. Before we jump into that, could you give a brief overview of the company and your role there?

We’re a remote-first fertility company, which means we come to our patients wherever they are so they can get their fertility treatment. A lot of people going through the process of fertility care have to travel hours at a time on a daily or weekly basis, and it causes enormous disruption to their everyday lives. There’s the travel, and then there’s also getting your appointment set up – all of the logistics that come along with that are challenging. So instead, we offer a white-glove service: we’ll take care of all of the logistics on your behalf. As long as you’re about 15 to 30 minutes away from Quest or LabCorp, or any kind of lab like that, all you need to do is go there and get your labs done. Our doctor – who is available virtually – will review your results and then decide on the best treatment for you. So you’re getting world-class fertility care, but you don’t have to be in New York. You can be in Ohio, you can be in Washington State, you can be in Arizona, you can be anywhere in the United States – no travel required.

I’m Head of Product Marketing and Patient Experience.

What drove you to look for a solution like DrChrono?

We need a place that holds a user profile and all of the user documentation – there’s no way around that. So we need an EHR system – we need a place where we have a profile for each patient who comes in and where we can store their license, identification, past and more recent medical records, lab results, and so on. This is also a place where, if the vendors are able, they can send us the patient records and lab results directly.

What were the key requirements that you used to evaluate DrChrono and other solutions?

I think we mainly just needed a HIPAA-compliant database. It’s something that we could use a Google workspace for – we could just sign a BAA and have it work because it’s basically just an electronic folder mechanism for a patient profile – but Google obviously is very limited. DrChrono has a few more capabilities. From a clinical standpoint, when we need to move the patient along in our fertility care process, we’re able to assign tasks within the system so that the doctor and their staff are able to communicate about patients, view patients’ profiles, and see their history and what needs to happen next.

Do you have any context on why you decided to move forward with DrChrono?

This is an assumption, but I think because our CMO and our CTO had used it before, that was helpful. Our CTO is building out our own product, so I think his experience with it was probably the primary reason. He thought that DrChrono had the best API infrastructure for us to one day be able to bolt our product onto. It’s something that we’ll need to use in the future, even once our product launches, and I think that he felt that it had the best capabilities for our use case.

What are your use cases and workflows with respect to the product?

The user needs to be able to come to our website and set up an appointment with the doctor, while on our end, we’re able to collect the information that we need from them to set up a patient profile in our system, which is really important as we try and continue patient communications. Maybe they’re just doing an initial exploration – peeking over the fence to see what we’re offering, and they just want to set up a “get to know you” appointment conversation. We want to make sure that we have their name and their email. We’re mainly using it as a CRM tool at that point, so that after that initial conversation, we can reach out to them to continue the conversation.

If it’s someone who’s very well versed in fertility and they are absolutely ready to move forward from our admin and clinical viewpoint, we already have their name, email, and phone number. We can continue to get their ID and any past lab results much more easily. Having their information allows us to have a clear, open line of communication with them when they’re coming to us for the very first time.

What are the product features that you use?

Tasks are very important to us. We don’t currently have any other task capabilities within our organization. So – especially for the clinical team – it’s very important that they use DrChrono to track their task statuses. So we’re absolutely using that.

We’re using charting, too. The patient typically has an initial conversation with our care team and with our admin team to better understand our process, and we don’t use DrChrono for that – that’s separate. But for the patient’s first appointment with the doctor, and then all other appointments thereafter, we’re using the charting capabilities in DrChrono. Our doctor is recording meeting notes and appointment notes. For any follow-up questions, concerns, or tasks that need to happen after that appointment, the doctor references the patient’s chart and assigns tasks to their clinical team. So those two capabilities work in tandem.

Do you use DrChrono to do video visits, billing, lab orders, or prescriptions?

We use the prescription ordering function – we rely very heavily on that. Once the charting is done following an appointment, the doctor puts in a prescription and assigns a task to someone on the clinical team to submit the prescription and make sure that it’s filled. So we definitely rely on the prescription capabilities.

We also use it to work with some vendors – for example, an MRI center that is processing ultrasounds for us. If they can send us the ultrasound results via DrChrono, that is extremely helpful. Not all of them are able to do that, but some of them are, and so it just creates a bit less friction in terms of us having to follow up and get those results.

What are DrChrono’s strengths and weaknesses in your view?

Not to sound too negative, but it is kind of a nightmarish system all round. We haven’t found anything else that works better though. So far, all of it has been very cumbersome for everyone across our entire team to use, including our clinical team, who is well versed in using these types of things.

I’ll start with task management; I think that’s probably our biggest challenge. We need a task management/ticketing/triaging system. It’s essential for us to have that, but it’s not a very user-friendly or intuitive experience trying to create tasks in DrChrono. For example, when a task is assigned to you, there are two ways to be notified of the task being assigned to you. The first is if you have the DrChrono app on your phone and you’ve enabled notifications, but in that instance, if you tap on the notification and try to go into DrChrono, there’s nothing you can do with it – there are no next steps. Typically, when you get a notification on your phone, you tap that notification, you go into the app, and there is something that you can do right then and there. With DrChrono, there’s nothing to do. You then have to get on your computer. It’s essentially just a notification system to let you know to get on to your desktop so that you can check out this task.

If you don’t have that phone notification enabled, the workaround is to enable email notifications from DrChrono and then to get an email every time a new task comes in. And just as when you’re on your phone, there are no next steps that you can take from that email – it’s just a notification to alert you to get to your computer so that you can follow up on the task. So it’s rather cumbersome in terms of the desktop experience.

There’s no way to get real-time notifications, either, other than just constantly refreshing your web browser. That’s created quite a lot of barriers for us. Our clinical team members have to be sitting on their computers constantly and hitting refresh, or if they don’t want to hit refresh, they need their phones next to them with the email or the app notifications set up to alert them that there is a new task. It’s just a very poor user experience. All of that being said, we must have a task management system, and that’s what we’ve found so far.

Can you share your perspective on the other elements you make use of: patient intake, charting, and receiving imaging orders?

The way that the images are received is very standard. It houses the documents appropriately. As long as the vendor has access to DrChrono as well, it’s a pretty effortless experience. So that’s the one somewhat positive review that I would leave DrChrono.

As for charting, it’s just not a good user interface. I know that it probably sounds silly to a lot of people, but our clinical team is much less likely to actually use the system. Instead, they’re more likely to create a Word document or a Google Doc where they can just write everything down because it’s just much more intuitive, much easier to use and just much nicer to look at than the DrChrono experience. So we’ve found that, for charting, the actual notes are often not held in DrChrono; we have to go outside of the system to find the notes somewhere else and then bring them into DrChrono to hold them there. It leaves a lot to be desired from a UI perspective.

Intake is also not great. While we need to use DrChrono as an intake form, it’s not serving us very well, so we’ve found a workaround using a product called Streak. It’s a CRM tool, and we’re basically taking all of the patients that come through DrChrono on any given day and putting them into Streak. Within Streak, we’ve created our own patient flow chart, and we’re manually putting patients wherever they fit in those patient charts. In DrChrono, we’re not able to sort and order patients in a way that is useful to us. We need to be able to see where patients are on their journeys, but when they come in through the intake form, they’re just there – they’re not sorted in any way. So we’re exporting an Excel spreadsheet daily, which we then put into Streak to create our own patient journey.

Any strengths to mention?

Not really. If I had to leave a one-line review, I would call it a necessary evil.

Is the platform generally stable and reliable? Have you encountered any performance issues or bugs?

It’s horrifically slow, and I have no idea why. Everyone in our company has issues with how slow it is. It’s insanely cumbersome; it takes us a very long time to do anything.

What’s your perspective on the developer experience of building on top of DrChrono?

I think, from an API standpoint, it works well. I’m fairly certain that’s why we chose to use DrChrono in the first place. We’re the ones who have to build on it and work around it, but it’s doable – as long as you have the resources to build, you can make it work. I don’t think our engineering team necessarily has any qualms about it. It’s been fairly easy to get Calendly set up and running. I think we’ve had a couple of issues in terms of patients being unable to make appointments, but I think that was more of a Calendly issue. So, in terms of getting things set up, it’s been fine.

How would you characterize their support or account management?

Not great. We’ve reached out with feature requests, and they’re not bothered. I don’t think they feel the need to move forward on any of the features we’ve asked for. They do respond within about a day, so the response time is good.