The legal battles may continue for the Chicago-based provider of EHR software Allscripts, according to a recent report from the South Florida Business Journal. The report says that a physician group from Panama City, Fla. is suing Allscripts because it claims Allscripts' MyWay EHR was defective.
The Business Journal report says that in the lawsuit the physician group, Pain Clinic of Northwest FL, mentions how the MyWay EHR cost $40,000 per physician to implement. The product, the lawsuit purports, was sold to about 5,000 small group physicians from 2009 to last year, when Allscripts took it off the market. Last year, in October, Allscripts decided to consolidate MyWay with its professional EHR suite
On its site, Allscripts is offering a free upgrade to this professional suite for all MyWay users. However, the complaint says the upgrade is “not free of substantial cost.” According tothe Business Journal, the group says that choose to upgrade, “must learn a new interface after spending so much time acclimating to the old system, and will continue to suffer the financial loss of the time and expense to re-train employees and migrate data, as well as the added cost to license and maintain a more complicated software program that exceeds the needs of most small physician practice groups.”
In addition, the report says that the physician group says it costs money to ditch the Allscripts product and have their data sent back to them.
A spokesperson for Allscripts says the company does not discuss pending litigation but that it 'will vigorously defend ourselves in this matter.'
This is not the first notable lawsuit for the company in recent times. However, in the other one, Allscripts was actually filing the lawsuit. In that one, Allscripts lodged a formal complaint with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation over that health system’s awarding of an EHR implementation contract to the Verona, Wis.-based Epic Systems Corporation, instead of to Allscripts.
