Emerging Post–Acute Care Product Suites 2021
An Initial Look at the Netsmart Suite

What Is a Post–Acute Care Product Suite?

A PAC product suite is a collection of solutions designed for use in different care settings. Most organizations don’t offer the full gamut of PAC services (they offer home-based or facility-based care), and comprehensive technology is still emerging. Vendor portfolio expansion is primarily acquisition driven.

Netsmart Post–Acute Care Product Suite

Netsmart has one of the broadest portfolios in the PAC market—it includes go-forward PAC EHR myUnity, behavioral health solutions myAvatar and myEvolv, and solutions acquired^† from Allscripts, Change Healthcare, DeVero, HAS, HealthMEDX, and Tellus. Interviewed Netsmart clients^‡ are split almost evenly between users of legacy solutions and users of go-forward solutions. They say Netsmart’s solutions generally meet clinical, financial, and administrative needs but that solution development is lacking. Respondents feel their overall experience could be improved if Netsmart put more emphasis on development and support (rather than sales). Customers overall are not highly likely to keep their solutions long term. Some want to move from the legacy Allscripts and Change Healthcare solutions to go-forward Netsmart solutions (e.g., myUnity Enterprise or Essentials) or to competitors’ solutions. Others, including many on the newest solutions, are actively looking to leave Netsmart altogether. A large portion of interviewed customers feel stuck—they plan to keep their Netsmart solutions for the time being but would not buy them again.

Note: Other relevant acquisitions by Netsmart include GPM, McBee Associates, QIRT, Selman Holman, and SimpleLTC.

† For a full list of Netsmart products across post–acute care settings, see below.

‡ Netsmart declined to share a client list with KLAS. Interviewed customers on go-forward platforms were identified through peer referrals or KLAS’ other research methods.

Integration Is a Bright Spot for Those Seeing Outcomes; One-Third of Respondents Report No Outcomes

Roughly one in four interviewed customers using Netsmart’s technology portfolio across multiple care settings say the biggest benefit they have received is the integration with third-party technologies. Key integrations mentioned by respondents include connections to data warehouses, private and public HIE networks, critical exchange partners (i.e., other healthcare affiliates), and electronic visit verification solutions. One customer noted that the integration between Netsmart’s clinical and financial offerings is a win over using disparate systems or paper.

Some organizations also report benefits like clinical efficiency and performance reporting/visibility, but these are not generating high satisfaction and are seen as baseline expectations for any EMR and the natural byproducts of moving away from paper. Just over one-third of interviewed customers—including some on the newest go-forward platform—report they have not seen any outcomes or benefits from using Netsmart’s product portfolio. Some of these organizations say costs prohibit them from leveraging tools (e.g., interfaces, reports) that would make their system more valuable. Additionally, due to issues with support, development, and bugs, many are considering replacing Netsmart with another PAC vendor.

Need for Workarounds Hampers Success with Netsmart; Most Interviewed Clients Not Optimistic about the Future

Portfolio Breadth Is a Plus; Lack of Transparency a Key Barrier to Success

Interviewed customers appreciate that Netsmart offers a broad range of solutions across many key areas of PAC (including rehabilitation facilities) and behavioral health. Many of these solutions have a long industry track record, which appeals to some customers. The challenges customers experience often started after Netsmart acquired their product (or products), at which point previously strong solutions began to receive less development and ongoing support. Customers want Netsmart to focus on keeping promises and increasing transparency in all areas of the vendor/client relationship.

Breadth of portfolio

“Netsmart has a really large suite of offerings and a large set of tools and services. If I were a smaller operation and wanted to have vendor rationalization and work with a primary vendor, Netsmart Homecare would be good. Netsmart has a really robust portfolio, and that is a strength of theirs.”  —IT director (using Homecare [Allscripts] for home health, hospice, and palliative care)

Third-party integration

“We can send HL7 transactions as well as connect to a health information exchange. The vendor has the ability within their myUnity Enterprise product to automatically query a health information exchange upon admission.” —IT analyst (using myUnity Enterprise for senior living and skilled nursing facilities)

Longtime industry experience

“Netsmart knows the industry space very well. That is nice. The vendor is not a fly-by-night organization that doesn’t understand the nuances and regulatory issues that organizations like ours face. That is one of the vendor’s biggest strengths.”  —Director of operations (using Homecare Advisor [Change Healthcare] for home health and hospice)

Lack of development

“Netsmart doesn’t meet their timelines for the delivery of new technology or promises. The account representatives know the customers that are upset, but I haven’t heard from our representative in two years. Overall, the support and service need improvement. The product needs new programmers. Netsmart needs to take a hard look at how they manage product development.” —IT director (using Homecare Advisor [Change Healthcare] for home health, hospice and palliative care and myUnity Enterprise for senior living and skilled nursing facilities)

Unkept promises

“All the technology pieces that Netsmart rolls out never seem completely done. They all seem like add-on pieces. Netsmart had a program that looked good, but it ended up being very awkward to use it and assign users to the system. ePrescribing is required, and we have to get a waiver every year to not do ePrescribing because the same thing happens. Netsmart promises it, and it is almost built, and then they realize that the system they were building wouldn’t communicate information so that it could be viewed within myUnity Enterprise, so they go back to the drawing board. Netsmart has new products to show us, but they never materialize.” —IT analyst (using myUnity Enterprise for senior living and skilled nursing facilities)

Sales-focused culture

“Netsmart is too sales focused. They don’t necessarily understand the needs of all of their customers and put too many resources on sales rather than making the product meet the current customers’ needs. We have had no executive involvement lately. We had pretty good involvement in the past when Netsmart thought they were going to get a big sale from us, but the involvement has been limited to that.”  —VP of managed care (using Homecare [Allscripts] for home health, hospice, and palliative care)

The Netsmart Portfolio

Below are the various Netsmart solutions and the post–acute care settings they support.

About This Report

Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT products and services their organizations use. On an ongoing basis, evaluations are collected using KLAS’ standard quantitative evaluation, which is comprised of numeric ratings questions and yes/no questions. For this report, a supplemental evaluation was used to delve deeper into the most pressing questions facing the emerging market of post–acute care product suites.

Over the last 12 months, KLAS collected supplemental evaluations from 18 of Netsmart’s healthcare organization customers whose services cover multiple post–acute care settings and service lines.

Sample Sizes

Sample sizes displayed throughout this report (e.g., n=16) represent the total number of unique customer organizations interviewed for a given vendor or solution. However, it should be noted that to allow for the representation of differing perspectives within any one customer organization, samples may include surveys from different individuals at the same organization. Ratings from these individuals are aggregated in order to prevent any one organization’s feedback from disproportionately impacting a solution’s score.