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Paragon may be "less expensive" overall than other solutions but the target market of small facilities and limited budgets probably drove that more than anything else. The only thing keeping those existing customers on board was the belated addition of Ambulatory capabilities, something that market desperately needed for years as an integrated solution. Many customers decided to bite the bullet and wait for Ambulatory rather than start shopping competitors and migrating. I'm going to agree with the other person below that the product was acquired more for the customer base and upsell potential than for any perceived quality.
As for being "dependable" I can't speak to the end user experience which may have been wonderful but it was pretty clear from the many slide decks I had to sit through and customers I had to speak with that a lot of work needed to be done to bring Paragon up to modern standards for resiliency and redundancy, and the product was about 10 years behind the rest of the industry in terms of virtualization, high availability, and database replication technologies. I'll keep QTS and Hosting out of this because the problems there are not necessarily entirely because of the software stack - but that whole arrangement is nearer the bottom of the short provider list than the top.
Bottom line is it's simply not cost-effective to continue development on Paragon much beyond a maintenance and occasional feature upgrade for the customer base size. They're having more success with the scalability of the SunComm model, which also provides a great deal more functionality in a package than Paragon does at a comparable price - and that's where the dev money will be going.
AS bought/invested in Paragon because it's dependable software for a comparatively better price. The 'problem' is that there's a lot of hostility and arrogance between AS and EIS. Let's not ignore the fact that AS forced a lot of employees to work on correcting current software, working OT, and then RIFing them at the end as a thank you.
I gotta go take a Paragon..
HEY @4jcm+15EobB59 Paragon IS profitable, doucheknocker. :)
Has Paragon ever turned a profit?
I don’t believe it did under McK and now retooled for the small hospital market. You don’t need a dev/test army at that scale.
I was on a call two weeks ago or so where the people involved were discussing Paragon as if it is THE Flagship Product of Allscripts. It was surreal, the mostly former EIS group honestly thought that Paragon was The Future. They were trying to make every other product line kind of take shape around Paragon, basing customer discussions on their "technology leadership" in Allscripts. I'm not joking, this discussion really took place.
Someone else had to kind of gently explain to them that the odds of selling a net-new Paragon footprint was about as close to zero as you can get and that we'd be lucky to retain the footprints we had now even if herculean efforts were put into improving the product and support of it. It was like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over their heads, and the call ended shortly thereafter.
bye Paragon
Long overdue