Robust feature set makes it very flexible solution

The feature sets are nice. They provide both outpatient and inpatient features. They offer the ability to customize exiating forms or create your own.

The solution is java based and can be slow. Could require a lot of maintenance by IT staff if not in a Citrix type emvironment.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to buy it.

???? Cool name? I can't think of anything this program does that is not better provided by other software.

The 72 hour deadline ensures that most people are putting in poorly witten and spelled garbage, because in real life emergencies happen and you can't always plan enough time for documentation on a giver day. The program is unwieldy to use: there is no way to set defaults to save time or enter multiple notes on one client without have to search the client, and enter all the same information again. You can't easily correct or add to a note once submitted. It's not user friendly- the software is sloppy. It is very difficult to find anything once you have put it in unless you know who entered it and the exact date. For the first time in over 30 years in the field, I almost never check notes , because it is no difficult to find anything. More than half of the note that comes up is repetitiuos garbage in tiny print, if you do make the effort, so it is hard to find the info that was input. If you enter anythingincorrectly in the calendar, you lose all the data and have to start over. In some reports you have to enter your last name and first initial, on others you get an error message if you enter your first initial. Some common client names are glitchy and do not come up when you search, so you have to look up their record number.

It's made me very jealous of providers that use Epic. It looks nice, it's fast, and it seems to be laid out logically with the user in mind.

Avatar was the upgrade from our previous software SATIS, about 15 years ago. That felt like an upgrade compared to the MS-DOS like UI of SATIS.

Slow and clunky. Frequent outages would paralyze our ability to work. Running simple reports with few pages can take 30 minutes, and that may be on a fast day. We were just recently "upgraded" to the NX version, and wow...never have I seen an upgrade be such a downgrade. It's as if they surveyed users to find out what functions were most beneficial to an efficient workflow, then made a conscious effort to take them out...literally. There is no evident benefit to the upgrade other than a visual refresh. Efficiency was clearly not a focus as it now takes more time and work to complete tasks that could be done from the home screen. The scheduling calendar looks like it open 3-4 different pages before then looking like Netflix on shoddy wifi on a Friday night. Some information that used to be visible in one click has been made impossible to access without running a massively time consuming report for a few lines of info. Someone coming from paper charting might decide paper isn't too bad. The best part of NX is that it made me realize that the previous version wasn't so bad. I would only suggest it to people looking to frustrate their employees into resignation. I could blame my employer for choosing to go live with it in it's current state, but this is Netsmart's product, and it's horrible.

The worst possible user experience. Wastes so much time, makes me want to quit my job.

I can’t think of anything. It’s truly awful.

UI, inconsistency of design, buggy nature, readability, difficulty of use.

Daily despair, progressing more recently to potentially life-threatening arrhythmias. Seeing patients while documenting and looking for data concurrently is a torturous burden. With each patient encounter comes an average of 4 system failures of various sorts, some show stoppers, some actual threats to patient safety such as displaying someone else's records randomly or simply erasing the detailed note you just wrote for that critical patient. And many failures are completely new after 6 years. Every so often Netsmart upgrades the system, meaning we have to learn a very different interface, and also meaning that we need to concurrently use all of the preceding system iterations, because Netsmart has not included all previous functions that are necessary to see patients. Soon we will lose access to the iteration that allows us to look up past records quickly and easily, which may turn that function into evening and weekend projects if we value the lives of our patients. This likely contributes to loss of prescribing staff. I stay because I've already seen the human cost of patients going without consistent providers for long periods, especially in an information-challenged system.

Some parts of it look as though they might be a real medical grade EHR software.

It is not even remotely medical grade EHR software.

They were supposedly designing the latest and greatest EMR but what we got was awful. To give you an idea of how bad it is, the software would often crash while in the middle of using it with a client/patient.

I am really trying hard to think of a pro. If I have to put that much thought into trying to come up with a positive I would have to say there probably is not much. This would be good software to use if your agency is shady and needs to hide to things because it is so hard from anyone from the outside to find anything on it.

Let's start with the no in-person support when we went live despite being told someone would be here. The biggest problem is it is not intuitive and very difficult to access things. It seems like the software was deliberating designed to not be able to find things as if we should be hiding things from auditors and regulators. The upgrade from MyAvatar to MyAvatarNX was actually worse. The software is so bad that it demoralized me to the point of looking for different employment after 7 years.

It has some positives, but overall it is very frustrating due to increased work load from a lack of efficient coding to provide better ease of use.

It is easier to use than the former EMR utilized.

It is not user friendly; it is clear that the people designing it have not ever worked in the field. There are too many clicks without efficiency. It creates more work because of that lack of efficiency within writing/coding the software.

It pretty much got me fired.

It puts EMR I.T. people to work in the industry I guess.

The platform looks like something from the "dial up" era, its slow and will crash in the middle of a session. I eventually got fired for shouting out f-bombs in my office (no one in session but me and the computer of course..) Its easy to lose forms or drafts, making you have to fill it out over again. You can barely read a completed form if you find a way to complete it which is cause for celebration. When you do a CCAR or a simple R.O.I. you get error messages and you have to go back. Heck with this job, I'm going to find a way to get into private practice. No more community "McMental Health" for this therapist. This software makes all of the paperwork we have to do even harder. Even the supervisors and EMR techs didn't know how to use it.

Netsmart Avatar COULD be a good program if only the folks at Netsmart would make it more stable.

once learned, you can enjoy a couple months of stability in your work day. you can take donut breaks when it crashes.

it crashes. gives you cryptic error messages (before it crashes). it won't let you log on. Netsmart seems to be building in problems that the city will then pay to keep the platform running.

Nothing, it is terrible. I would not recommend this to anyone.

It is full of bugs and does not work well under the best circumstances.

There is very little to like. I have used other systems and all are better. I cannot even say it is reliable.

Not reliable, crashes and runs slow with page load lags, patient information is fragmented, script ordering has a poor display and the history is organized by month, day, then year - it is IMPOSSIBLE to view prescription history in chronological order (needs to be year, month, day)- patient safety risk in my opinion. Labs do not display correct dates - displays the date reviewed not date resulted (leads to patient safety risk). There is not a simple way to do anything in this system. You must approve each note you submit and then click away many pop-ups for menial things like “note filed” (just why?!). If I was to work somewhere else, I would not go to work for a company that had this software. It is driving me to want to find a company that uses something else.

The software can be customized to meet state and federal requirements. Avatar has the capability to allow individual users to change screen requirements to meet their daily workflow needs and screen shots. Avatar has a forms format that is compartmentalized keeping data protected from view of client or staff that is not authorized for medical history( i.e. receptionist does not view prescriptions and social history). Screens can be adjusted for color blindness, poor vision and put in an work flow order. Customer support was professional and were often able to make corrections with in the day.

The issues we have experienced is some documentation not being put on the server. Difficulty with learning to navigating to find the needed forms. A document may be listed by abbreviation in the creation of document but when looking in the clients clinical record it may be listed differently in two areas, such as to edit or to read current information with different titles. This lead to lots of confusion when the users tried to explain to the IT department which form was not working. There is also a lot of unnecessary repetitive drop downs such as type of note, when it was in schedule and 3 places on the document. Avatar is difficult to have multiscreen shots to see a completed note when following up with a current service. The timers for informing clinicians of upcoming work need improvement this lead to a lot of unbillable services.

Used to be good now it's poor

When we purchased it, it was very good but now not so much

Cost, no support from Netsmart, not able to make font size adjustment so you can read the home page. Many other fields that can't be changed

Without question the worst EMR I have ever used. Time consuming, clunky, inefficient, and extremely frustrating. Our system is actively seeking a replacement and it cannot come soon enough.

Avatar has a wide variety of features, but the steps involved to complete even simple tasks and the incredibly cumbersome and counter-intuitive interface makes the whole experience a nightmare.

Absolutely awful program--trying to enter a simple medication order requires a dozen steps, poorly designed options, and navigating to multiple screens. Labs are difficult to find. There is no way to cut and paste a note within the program--it has to be accessed as a PDF, saved and converted to an editable Word RDF document, and then reformatted into Word, edited, and then cut and pasted back into Avatar. The examples are endless. . .and you want to use Word for notes, as the program crashes with depressing regularity.

It is 'robust'. That is to say that if you have the resources to have IT staff dedicated to customizing this product it is very configurable and can house and product data reports to a great extent.

The software is a beast; not supportable in house by people that are not IT brainiacs. Of equal importance is that the Netsmart business model is not financially unsustainable for any operation other than a state or large hospital system, Everything is a separate module, not well integrated either and each have separate implementation, annual user and annual licensing costs. On top of all of this it is not user friendly or intuitive for staff at ALL!

It has nice background colors. It is very basic. It is not complicated with fancy features that Cerner and EPIC have.

It is often non-functional. There is no way to search for studies such as imaging. It does not help track quality metrics.

Time is money in Psychiatry as in everything else. This product slows one down seriously. Everything has to be typed in every time, or has to be manual ' copy and paste ' to 'progress note' site brought in from ' print medical records' 'a slow or I should say very slow process. When you come back to 'progress note' you have to punch in patient name again. In as much as I know, there is no way to build automatic templates, unless you copy and paste from Microsoft word, which is a process itself for one's gotten used to apple products. There is also no way to automatically build up on already existing date such as identifying info, social hist., past history, etc unless you transfer the whole previous note and then comb thru each line. Many systems like ' epic 'allow you to update easily to old notes. The system is old, with no major improvements except one to ' my avatar'.Somehow it has managed to dominate mental health field. Recommendations-- At the very least build one button templates for different kind of notes psychiatrists write which are just a few anyways.

This was clearly designed w/out the assistance of ay mental health professional on site!!

There is absolutely NOTHING good about this software! It is spotty and the most repetitive piece of EHR software I have ever utilized!

A professional diligently types notes of all sorts throughout the day and myAvatar will "just decide" to trash it and make one start all over. The "bundles" are not helpful at all. Ridiculous reptition!

The home viewing screen is use friendly, When the user sees the screen for the first time, It it makes you comfortable for training, simplistic as opening up a paper chart.

There is so much you can do with it (The Program) some companies who are afraid of electronic charting don't utilize all the functions that it can do that can make the job even easier.

Stressful

There are no pros to the software. Buyer beware stay away run fast

All of it it simply needs to be destroyed and not used by anyone for any reason at any time

This system has doubled the amount of time we're writing notes and we are capturing a fraction of the information

Honestly? I like that I can change the color of my screen.

Impossible to navigate, you reenter the same information on multiple screens, the diagnostic feature is inadequate... the list goes on and on. No one in my agency likes it. It is clearly a vehicle to collect data. I would LITERALLY use an old typewriter instead of this. If you care anything about your patients, stay away from this platform!

It is the WORST medical program I have ever used and it is also the slowest one I have ever used.

Turning it OFF at the end of everyday!!

This program is so slow and not user friendly at all. Takes five ever to schedule an appointment. I would not recommend this program to anyone.

We weren’t just looking for the right software product, we were looking for the right partner. We replaced components of our legacy back end practice management software with MyAvatar’s Practice Management (PM) and Clinical Workstation (CWS) solutions; also modules like MobileConnect, which allows its more than 200 clinicians to take and submit electronic notes securely from the field without having to come to the office. It’s gotten rave reviews from the staff. Netsmart is constantly improving their product and has made it possible for us to move forward and successfully receive "Meaningful Use" stimulus dollars to help pay for our EHR initiatives. They are a very good vendor partner for Henderson.

Nothing at all, this product literally has no redeeming qualities.

Completely ridiculous formatting that requires an extraordinary number of extraneous keystrokes to enter even basic information.

This product is made available through our Behavioral Health Organization at no cost to providers until year 2020.

Clunky, need next generation options, SUD assessment requires cut and paste from Word processing as the fields do not align with ASAM criteria.