Migrating to Microsoft Azure

[tristateoms1]

Can someone who has migrated to Azure tell me how that went? We are scheduled to do this in a few weeks and I am worried it is going to mess something up. Any feedback would be appreciated!

[SOS_Tech]

We are being pushed into the migration as Carestream is now telling us we risk service disruption if not migrated by the end of September.

I cannot believe this migration process could be handled any worse than it has been.  Our office is a complicated case and we keep getting handed off.  Then I have to start the whole process of explaining all over again.

Seeing all the issues other practices are having post migration does not instill any confidence either.

[eastonoms]

Carestream kept pushing us to migrate as well. Other offices kept telling us of all their unresolved issues post migration and Carestream kept saying they didn't know of any issues. Make sure you confirm your appt. We canceled an entire day of surgery $$$ for the migration. As we were leaving for the day, we called Carestream to see if there were any special instructions regarding leaving workstations on or shutting down, and they said "oh your migration was canceled, no one told you?" Aside from all the issues, the lack of communication has by far been the worst!

Be prepared to shut down WINOMS and Citrix Workspace connection on all computers each night, and reconnect each morning. We have to load all the printer settings in WINOMS and the settings in OMS Imaging before we get started. None of the defaults remain overnight. Today support told us they are aware of these issues and it is estimated to be one month before a fix is in place.

[eastonoms]

I hope you have better luck than we have! Aside from the antiquated software itself, the constant disconnects, as another office mentioned in this thread, make for a really deflating and unproductive day.

[rich_omsafw]

I emailed someone at Carestream about these concerns.  Here is the response I got from him.  I hope these really are isolated issues.

"Thank you for bringing that to my attention… I think that’s a conflated issue.

There is an issue with a login being disconnected after 2 hours, which is currently in Microsoft’s\Citrix hands. That issue has only been reported by about 10 of the 560 practices as an inconvenience & as a once every other week occurrence. It’s an RDP license error, where basically the session didn’t get the key in time. Microsoft, Citrix and ourselves are still investigating.

Multiple disconnects a day is something completely different. I’m asking our support reach back out to that office."

[MJ]

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@rich_omsafw wrote:

Multiple disconnects a day is something completely different. I’m asking our support reach back out to that office."

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I have been waiting on a response from the escalation team, but the 1st tier support just keeps saying its a "known" issue with no ETA.  The whole thing is extremely frustrating to say the least.

[eastonoms]

We were advised by numerous other offices to NOT do it. We put it off as long as we could. The pre-migration process held things up, as CareStream could not get our anesthesia monitors functioning with the new platform. After several weeks, our IT figured it out and he doesn't know anything about the monitors.  With great hesitation, we finally migrated and have daily issues where WINOMS locks up and kicks us out. It happens when viewing the fee schedules, working in the claims section and Imaging area to name a few. We have been told to log completely out of Citrix and log back in. Yesterday we had to do that a dozen times. Our days are so unproductive. The Outlook 2016 and Word that WINOMS uses has been a struggle as well. CareStream support keeps saying our IT needs to fix the issues. Our IT says they are CareStream issues. We are not having any issues outside of CareStream. Our days are far from being productive...

[MJ]

Our office has recently migrated to the Azure servers and the new Citrix system. Unfortunately we have be plagued by numerous issues since the transition. For the most part, daily use remains the same albeit with noticeable delay in accessing patient charts. The most impactful issue has been constant disconnects while performing many different tasks within the WinOMS software. We have two different locations, with about 20 workstations and at least 85% of them are having the disconnecting issue. After speaking with CS support, being told its a known issue with the partnered Microsoft team and no ETA.

Not sure what customer side benefits we should be seeing having switched to  Azure. Good luck in your future migration.

[eastonoms]

We are having the same issues. The staff here say they have never worked with Dental/Medical software this bad. We are going to reach out to some other offices to see what they are using.

[rich_omsafw]

I was really hoping you would get some feedback on this as well.  We are migrating on 8/27.  Let's hope things go well for us.  

[rich_omsafw]

@eastonoms @MJ Just a follow up on this with offices that are getting disconnected.  Are you getting kicked out with error messages or are you timing out?  Another person from Carestream emailed me back and said it is the 2hour inactivity time out that is causing disconnects.  Can anyone verify this?

[eastonoms]

The software disconnects multiple times a day, sometimes multiple times in an hour. No errors. Sometimes we are disconnect from WINOMS and other times we are disconnected from Citrix Workspace. Every morning, our printer settings within WINOMS are cleared and nothing prints. Outside of WINOMS, the printers and settings are fine. This morning someone else's printers were listed and ours were missing within WINOMS. This is very concerning to say the least!

[SOS_Tech]

Printers belonging to a completely separate practice?  Seriously?

[MJ]

The timing out of WinOMS is frustrating, but we are also having issues with the software disconnecting multiple times while actively using it. This has even happened consecutively on numerous workstations within a 45min period. For those disconnects there has not been an error, the program just completely closes out.

[eastonoms]

SAME!!

[rich_omsafw]

Not sure if this is the case or not but we had an issue were WinOMS was closing randomly for users.  We wouldn't get any error or anything.  The user would then launch WinOMS again and it would come back up.  I found that when I was entering the user info for into Citrix I used the same license multiple times.  For example, our Citrix users for WinOMS are omain055.  I used omain055 on 3 workstations and they were always "fighting" for WinOMS.  If workstation1 was using winOMS and user on workstation2 launched WinOMS, workstation2 would take over the session from Workstation1.  Workstation1 would get no errors, WinOMS would just close.   I would verify that each workstation has its own user license.  If that isn't the case, please let me know.  We are migrating this weekend and just trying to be as prepared as I can.  Thanks

[SOS_Tech]

How did the migration go for your practice?

[rich_omsafw]

Overall the migration went really well.  We were up and running at 7AM on Monday.  I have spent this week putting out random fires but nothing too crazy.  The speed of WinOMS is worth the upgrade.  It's only been 3/4 days but we aren't experiencing the freezes or kick outs that others have described.  The only disruption we are having is some users are having WinOMS "freeze" when entering health history.  When this happens, opening a different program (Chrome, explorer, etc) and then minimizing "unfreezes" WinOMS and users go about their business.  I have no idea why this is happening or why that would fix but its helped.  So overall the migration to Azure has been a major success.  I hope this continues to be the case and I hope whenever v10 comes out it goes at smooth.

[rich_omsafw]

We migrated just over 2 weeks ago.  I will say our office is glad we migrated.  The overall speed of WinOMS is way better.  We have noticed the issues that other offices have had with being kicked out however users say they are getting kicked out less than.  Most complaints with getting kicked out happen during a letter merge or scanning/attaching xrays.  I'm sending these things onto escalations to see if they have anything.  

[eastonoms]

Do you use NEA FastAttach? We get an error every 1 to 2 days. The error says NEAATTACHMENT.LOG NOT FOUND. Support has to remote in to fix it, which takes them 30 min to an hour if the tech that answers knows how to do it! ugggghhh