October 10, 2023

Notice to Potential Customers and Current Customers of the Aspire software package, the Ontario Chiropractic Association (OCA) Management and OCA Board of Directors.

A Call to Action

Our clinic has been using the Electronic Health Record (EHR) portion of Aspire for approximately 4 years, and the scheduling and the patient / customer invoicing (Freshbooks) for nearly 10 months. To say the experience has been “extremely poor” is an understatement. The countless software issues combined with the OCA’s borderline negligent management / customer service has rendered the experience extremely frustrating to the point of absolute utter helplessness. I have tried to connect with the OCA Board for greater than a year, but have been denied access. As a result, this Open Letter seems to be the only way to contact the Board and warn potential customers.

I have been an OCA member for 19 years. Their conduct during my time using Aspire has been an embarrassment to all members of the association. This organization has produced a substandard product, which includes errors that result in incorrect accounting, incorrect charts, as well as data loss. They are not fixing these issues, and are not notifying their users. The issues listed in this document are but a small subset of the issues our clinic has experienced.

• Issues with the software include (but are not limited to)
  • multiple issues of patient data loss were ignored or downplayed
  • It has been nine months since we showed them that “repeat” and “multiple” scheduling of appointments does not work, it is still not fixed. This is an advertised feature in their marketing that does not work if you do not book 15 minutes appointments.
  • The schedule is not available on mobile – want to check your schedule while you are away from a desktop computer? This is not possible in Aspire and they do not make it clear until after you sign up.
  • Do you work on Saturday? Freshbooks “upgrades” happen on Saturdays from 9 am to 12 noon Eastern. This means that you will have no ability to send a patient an invoice, no ability to record payments. This occurred three times in our first five months. OCA notified us on a Friday at 5 pm that there would be no accounting the next morning for our work day. This is the level of service that becomes the norm when dealing with Aspire.
  • Your front desk staff makes a mistake while recording data in Freshbooks – it breaks the sync with Aspire. Try to call OCA – they won’t answer the phone. Submit a ticket and wait – but you won’t be doing any accounting, taking payments etc., until they fix the problem.
  • If you have practitioners being paid a percentage of sales – if you give them a raise, the next time you try to generate a historical financial report it will be incorrect.
  • There are many more examples of problems with the software, but the above gives you a tiny glimpse of issues.

The most important reason for you to avoid Aspire is the lack of professional and competent customer service. During our time with Aspire, our clinic has been involved with what the OCA Privacy Officer described as a “privacy near miss”. OCA staff has:

1) asked for confidential patient data to be emailed to them,

2) advised I email my Aspire user name, password and PIN to them – which had potential to compromise our entire patient database

3) configured a “secure” Dropbox for me to share with them my login credentials – only they didn’t configure the Dropbox properly and Dropbox emailed my user credentials to them and myself.

Tickets for customer service are often ignored. Emails about these tickets are also ignored for weeks to months. Communication with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is routinely ignored. Escalation of customer service concerns to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the OCA resulted in being told I was “causing her staff a lot of work” and that the reason our clinic is having so much trouble with the OCA was because of my “bad Karma”.

For the last year I have been requesting to present to the Board of the OCA as a whole, to outline my concerns. These requests were denied, or simply ignored. A discussion with a Board Member, and then the Board President seemed fruitful, but resulted in no changes. The President advised that we would meet again in a couple months to update him on the situation, but he has ignored all communication since the first meeting. A dues paying member of the OCA is being ignored by, and denied access to the Board of Directors. They have also denied access to Board Meeting Minutes. In short, expect no customer service when you have issues with your software, even if you are a member of the OCA.

Most concerning of all is a complete lack of transparency by OCA management. Our clinic has reported an easily reproducible workflow that results in incorrect data being recorded into a patient chart. The OCA is not fixing the issue, stating “it is not how you were trained to use the software”. Practitioners in our clinic were using this workflow, resulting in incorrect patient charts. If it is happening in our clinic, it is happening in others – and the OCA has refused to fix it, and even more importantly, they are not advising users it is occurring.

Our clinic also showed the OCA management that their accounting reports were incorrect. This resulted in months of incorrect pay-cheques to our practitioners. To their credit, they did fix this issue, but they have not advised users that accounting reports had incorrect data. This error was present for many months. If you have you used an Aspire accounting report to pay your practitioners, you may have paid them incorrectly, and the OCA Aspire team is not being transparent and notifying users of the problem.

Finally, we have found another incorrect accounting report. It has not been reported to the OCA, as they have been ignoring my requests for meetings. Sixty one days ago the OCA CEO stated they would contact me in the next week to schedule a meeting. Two weeks later I asked for an update about the meeting. They have not attempted to set up the meeting, and my follow up email was ignored, as have been countless other emails over my 4 years dealing with the OCA.

Our experience with the software and customer service has been so poor that we have not charged for the past six months, and even receiving free software we are leaving to a competitor as it is simply not worth the aggravation of working with this software / service package.

We have now moved off the Aspire platform. During this process, we were advised that they may be unable to do a bulk export of our patient charts as PDF files. The OCA recommendation is to have our staff manually download all patient data for upload to our new system. Quick calculations indicate this could take as much as three weeks of staff time. Although they are looking into the bulk export, it has now been three weeks and they are once again ignoring emails asking for updates on this situation. The initial request was made on September 21, a follow up email was sent to the CIO on September 27, 2023 (it was ignored) and then another follow up request was made to the CIO on October 2, 2023. As of the date of writing this document on October 10, 2023 it has also been ignored.

With their customer service approaching a level that can only be described as incredibly poor, I have no confidence in the ability of the OCA executive team to develop this software, and the entire project needs to be re-evaluated. In 2023, the Aspire team should not be trusted with patient and financial data, your time or your license to practice. I would implore the OCA Board of Directors to take a very close look at the software, and the management team overseeing the OCA Aspire program. I feel the OCA is putting itself in a dangerous position of legal liability while providing a substandard product and poor experience for it’s membership. The Board knows how to contact me to further discuss these issues – which is what I have been trying to accomplish for greater than a year.

Dr. Nick Green