Our lab recently installed Orchard Harvest software. I am certain that our
experience is not typical, no company would survive long if it was. In fact
after 4 lemon hematology instruments in a row we are beginning to think
that maybe the lab is built on top of a sacred indian burial ground. I
actually like the Orchard software quite a bit, but...

The night before we were to go live the Orchard rep who was on-site did
something that caused the deletion of days of customization and tweaking
done by our 3 operators who were sent to training. They were not happy, but
were able to get the system back into an operatable condition by late
morning and we went live.

A couple of hours later the Orchard rep who was on-site did something that
caused the deletion of the settings again, along with every bit of patient
data that had been entered up to then. No back-up was ever found. All of
the patient data that could be reconstructed was re-entered manually after
a lengthy down-time.

The system then ran flawlessly for almost 24 hours and then the Orchard rep
who was on-site did something that caused the deletion of the settings once
again, along with every bit of patient data that had been entered up to
that point. Admitedly he was having a bad couple of days, but so were we
all. Once again no back-up was ever found and results had to be
reconstructed as best we could. (This counts as one of the worst days of my
life, excluding my first marriage.)

Then, after nearly two weeks of comparatively flawless performance, the
Orchard rep who was once again on-site did something that caused the
deletion of the settings again, along with every bit of patient data that
had been entered up to then. This time a back-up was found, but as of this
writing, it is still incomplete.

To be fair, the source of the problem could just as easily be with our
hospital's IT department as with Orchard, but either way we are all close
to going on a collective shooting rampage. The beauty of the Orchard
software is it is almost totally paperless. If you loose data, it is gone
for good. What has happened has shaken the confidence of everybody.

All I can say is...

           Caveat Emptor

Anonymous