EMR Costs and Limitations

Costs

The Mountainside Electronic Medical Records application is delivered to each customer for a startup fee as negotiated in the customer’s contract. Ongoing monthly fees in said contract cover all software updates and “normal” customer support.
In addition to these fees, Mountainside charges a one-time fee for:

  • Installation and/or setup of each service interface. These include:
    • One-way and bi-directional HL7 interfaces for communications with 3rd party applications such as Practice Management
    • Order-entry to and/or results from laboratory systems
    • State immunization and/or health registries
  • Re-installation of server or workstation applications

Service interfaces will incur a nominal ongoing monthly maintenance fee.
When we add new services, existing customers may be asked to pay a monthly fee for access to such services when the fees for those services are not covered by their existing maintenance agreements. For example, when we added Direct Messaging, we licensed a third-party application that has a monthly cost that we must cover through fees (price per provider); new customers will have those fees included in their monthly maintenance fee.

Some data exports, such as the ability to create and store a most recent Clinical Summary for every patient on the system, is included at no charge.  Any other data exports will incur a nominal fee.

Contractual Limitations

Mountainside does not impose contractual limitations on the use of the applications that we sell, or licenses, to our customers. We do not employee a menu of features from which you must pick and choose, but instead, make all application features available to all users. The only exception to this rule is for features, as stated above, that may have been added after the product was originally licensed and would incur an additional monthly fee.  

Technical Limitations

  • The Mountainside application suite, including our Electronic Medical Records, functions best for practices that employ up to about 100 providers.  Communications with outside vendors or entities, such as Direct Messaging, is only limited by available internet bandwidth.
    • Direct Messaging services are provided through Surescripts by way of Mountainside’s interface with MD Toolbox. Not all national providers are in the Surescripts directory, but they endeavor to connect with all known service providers. You should be able to exchange direct messages with providers even when they are not in the directory as long as you know their direct address.
  • At this time, our application suite may be run in a terminal services environment and/or installed on individual workstations. 
  • We highly recommend that certain reports, such as for meaningful use, be run either on the server or from a workstation on the same local network as the server (not from a remote office).