Helping you save money

This time last year, we introduced a new fairer, more transparent pricing system for RxWorks. It was the first time in 10 years that we had not simply increased your annual license fees by a flat 4%. As with anything new, it did generate many questions and I know our practice advisors and account managers have spent a lot of time explaining the system.

With the new pricing system, some of our clients have said some unkind things about us. I would like to take this opportunity to tell our side of the story.

For reasons of history, some of our clients had been paying very low fees. When we introduced the new pricing system, those clients did experience a significant increase in their annual fees and I can understand they would have preferred otherwise.  On the other hand, some clients who had been paying higher fees, benefited from reductions.

So why did we go through all this trouble? There were four main reasons:

1. Fairness – it simply was not fair to have clients paying significantly different amounts for the same software.
2. Transparency – we wanted you to be able to clearly see what you were paying for different parts of the system and satisfy yourself they were delivering value to your practice. If not we want to give you the option to swap them for another module that you would find more valuable.
3. Comparing apples with apples – as we have looked at how to serve you better, we are developing capabilities that go far beyond the traditional practice management system. Many of our competitors do not even have all the functionality contained in our base PIMS product let alone some of the modules. This was making it difficult for our prospective clients to compare apples with apples when making purchasing decisions. With the new pricing system, we can provide a solution to those who just want the traditional basic practice management system without all the bells and whistles as well as those that want the best possible system available and all in between.
4. To better reflect our actual costs – it costs us much more to support clients that do not use our hardware. This is because our servers are preconfigured to a standard, include lots of maintenance routines that run automatically, and our support staff know their way around them. With 3^rd party hardware there are so many unknown configuration variables that it not only takes a lot longer to deal with the issue, it usually involves much more senior staff. This cost differential is now included in our pricing and is why we introduced the RxWorks Server Module versus  the 3^rd Party Server Module and the 3^rd Party Peripherals Module.

Reducing other costs

Over the past year, we have taken many steps to reduce your costs of running RxWorks. To give you a taste let me tell you about 3 specific areas:

• Elimination of some ad-hoc service fees
• Reduction in Microsoft licensing costs
• Changes with the way we handle email

Elimination of some ad-hoc service fees

With the release of Microsoft Server 2008 R2, we were able to either automate some of the tasks we previously charged service fees for or give you the power to do them yourself without adversely affecting the integrity of the server. We have wanted to do this for a long time, but were unable to till now. This means after you purchase your next RxWorks supplied  server you now have a choice to either pay for these services as before, or use the tools to action them yourself free of charge. Here are some examples:

• Adding or changing a network user
• Adding or changing email accounts (more on this below)
• Adding your own printers to the network
• Formatting USB hard drive that you use for backups

Reduction in Microsoft Licensing costs

With the release of our RxWorks Server Module for SQL Server 2008 R2, we have also included what we call a document server that delivers three significant benefits:

• Speeds up printing
• Reduces the number of potential printer problem areas
• Changes the requirement for Microsoft office licenses from one per terminal to one for the document server plus one for each terminal where you want to be able to edit documents. For many clients these savings alone run into the thousands.

Please note, the Document Server is only available on RxWorks 2008 R2 Servers. If you use third party hardware, then you do not receive these benefits from RxWorks as your technicians will be providing the network infrastructure and printing capabilities.

Many clinics with large databases will be pleased to know that Microsoft has announced an increase in the maximum size of the database used with the free version of MS SQL from 4GB to 10GB when they release MS SQL 2008 R2. This should save clinics with large databases from having to purchase MS SQL Standard unless they want to use a specific feature like replication.

Changes with the way we handle email

In the past our servers have included an email server. Unfortunately, this meant that in order to protect it, we needed to restrict access to several things including adding or changing users. That meant we had to do it for you and charge a service fee. Many of our clients said they would like to be able to do these admin functions themselves given how easy services like Gmail and Hotmail were to use, they would prefer to use them instead.

As an interim step, we suggested using Outlook with your ISP’s POP email accounts. This eliminated the need for us to charge service fees, but introduced a number of security issues.

A third factor, for many years our customers have been requesting more collaboration tools e.g. Instant Messaging, Intranet Sites. We simply could not find a cost effective way to deliver those capabilities and do a first class job.

So having removed the email server from our server, we can no longer provide any email related support unless it pertains to the emails being sent directly from RxWorks. You are free to choose your own email provider, but you may want to consider Gmail for Organizations. They charge $50 per user per year, it allows you to use your own domain name in your email address and includes:

Gmail for business 25GB storage, less spam, and a 99.9% uptime SLA, and enhanced email security.

Google Docs Documents, spreadsheets, drawings and presentations. This is good for users that you do not purchase a Microsoft Office License for.

Google Groups User-created groups providing mailing lists, easy content sharing, and searchable archives.

Google Sites Secure, coding-free web pages for intranets and team managed sites.

Google Video Private, secure, hosted video sharing.

Once you stop using the email server on your RxWorks Server, we no longer need to charge you service fees for adding and changing email users. These quickly add up. Depending on your staff turnover, these savings may pay for Gmail for Organizations.

Support

Support is an area we continue to work hard and based on your feedback, it seems to have improved – but still runs hot and cold. Our target for the next 12 months is to improve the consistency of the service our support staff provide you. Keep the feedback (good and bad) coming – it really helps us as we work to improve this area.

One support related area where we have made big improvements is the fixing of reported software issues. Our development team has been releasing a new version every 3 months and all software issues reported before the pre-release testing starts are fixed prior to the final release. This means we can have the fix in your hands much faster than if new versions were released every 6 months or 12 months.

Our online manuals and client education material is another area we have made big improvements. If you have not been to our website recently, go and check out the online manual. New content is added on a weekly basis. We would love to hear about any areas that think should be clearer.

Getting the most out of RxWorks

There is a huge amount of new capability available to you. We have trialed several methods of assisting our clients to take advantage of that additional functionality and the most effective seems to be a staged approach. Do one stage, take it live, iron out any operational or training issues, make sure it is delivering value to your business, and then move onto the next stage.  

There is no need for this process to be rushed and you can spread it out over a year or two if you like. This will allow you to avoid your busy periods and focus on these business improvements during your quieter seasons. Keep an eye on the website over the next few months for more information about this process or talk to your practice advisor.

Hardware

Finally, I want to address our hardware pricing. From time to time we are forwarded various postings from clients claiming we are overcharging for hardware. These postings rarely contain true apples for apples comparisons, but cause concern for other clients who read the posting.

We do not view the provision of hardware as a profit centre, but rather a service that helps ensure clients have a stable platform to run RxWorks on. Our accounting system simply takes our buy price and marks it up by 15%. Think about how much you mark up your medications and retail items and I hope you will agree a 15% markup is very fair.

We hope you buy your hardware from us as we think we have priced it fairly and you are better off having one supplier rather than have a hardware and software supplier pointing fingers at each other. Or even worse a hardware supplier whose last involvement is shipping the item to you.

However, we fully understand that it is a free market and you are able to purchase from whom you choose. We would prefer you to make that choice rather than beating us up when we have no room to move on our hardware pricing. By the time we account for all our hardware related costs, that 15% markup rarely yields us a profit.

Conclusion

In closing, I would like to personally thank you for using RxWorks. We are working very hard to make the product and service even better.