PowerChart Touch vs AMSConnect
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
PowerChart Touch
This app enables healthcare providers to manage patient workflows on mobile devices. It offers secure access to patient charts, scheduling, order placement, and prescription management, facilitating efficient care delivery both inside and outside the facility.
- Review schedule and patient lists
- Access patient charts and demographic information
- Manage notes, allergies, problems, and histories
- Review clinical results and radiology reports
- Place orders and prescribe/refill medications
- Secure remote EHR access
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PowerChart Touch for iPad® and iPhone® supports fast, easy, and smart workflows. PowerChart Touch allows a provider to complete both ambulatory and inpatient workflows, including: • Review their schedule, patient list, and patient charts • Access the Physician Handoff, a standardized approach to transfer care of a patient between providers • Review patient's demographic information • Take patient's photo • Review, create, and sign notes • Review, add, and modify allergies, problems & histories • Review clinical results, radiology reports, and pathology reports • Review all orders including medication orders • Ability to place orders • Prescribe and refill medications with formulary support, electronic prescribing and printing • Clinical checking for safe prescription writing including drug-drug and drug-allergy checking • Dictate with Nuance voice recognition PowerChart Touch also provides secure access for providers needing access to the EHR outside of the facility's walls. IMPORTANT: PowerChart Touch requires your organization to have a valid license and be on release 2012.01 or higher. If you are unsure about the availability of PowerChart Touch at your organization, please contact your IT department or your Cerner representative.
AMSConnect
This HIPAA-compliant app enables secure text messaging for critical communications. It integrates with specialized devices, offers team messaging, and allows for message forwarding and availability status updates. Access messages on mobile or web with read receipts and advanced sharing options.
- HIPAA compliant secure messaging
- Pager integration for redundancy
- Service team and group messaging
- Critical alert override
- Message forwarding
- Availability status updates
- Mobile and web accessibility
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AMS Connect is a HIPAA compliant mobile application for critical and secure text messaging. Enhancing critical messaging workflows AMS Connect also integrates with American Messaging’s suite of critical messaging devices, providing reliable, secure, and redundant messaging. Key Features: - Send and receive secure text messages in compliance with HIPAA standards. - Pager Integration – Messages arrive on your pager, smartphone or both for redundancy and convenience. - Service Teams – Send a page to a service team or group. Adds backup and redundancy to the traditional “hand-off” or “pass around” pager with easy opt-in and opt-out of on-call pagers at any time. - Silent/Do Not Disturb Override – AMS Connect notifications can override “Silent” and “Do Not Disturb” phone settings when Critical Alerts are “Allowed” by the end-user. - Message Forwarding – Let your colleagues know who is covering you when off-duty and have your messages automatically forwarded to that person. - Availability Status – Set your status to let contacts know if you are available, bust or off duty and view the status of others. - Mobile & Web Accessibility – Access AMS Connect anytime, anywhere with device sync. - Read Receipts – See exactly if, and when your colleagues have read your messages with receipts. - Quick Messages - Quickly send commonly used messages by selecting from a list of pre-populated phrases or create your own. - Voice Notes – Record a voice message and send it securely within a conversation thread. - Photo & File Share – Safely send up to 5 photo and file attachments including PDF, Word, and Excel documents up to 28MB at a time. - Archived Messaging History – Ability to archive single, multiple or all messages (according to your organization’s retention policy). - Searchable Directory – Access a listing of professionals from your organization and message them directly. - Urgent Message – Alert your care team to critical information and events by sending an urgent message with a unique tone. - Critical Group Messaging – Privately and securely message individuals, teams, and other distribution groups. - Secure External Messaging – (enhanced feature) Send a HIPAA secure message or photo to anyone with a mobile phone. Secure external messages are encrypted conversations between an American Messaging user and an external user with a mobile device. No need to sign up and remember usernames and passwords. Just quick, easy secure communication.
Screenshots
Verdict
PowerChart Touch and AMSConnect both sit at 2.2 stars, but that hides the real split: 18% of AMSConnect's written reviews are positive against 9% of PowerChart Touch's. AMSConnect also leads on iOS requirement (15.6 vs 17.4). On price, rating, ratings volume and update cadence there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 2.2 for PowerChart Touch against 2.2 for AMSConnect. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 204 and 285 respectively. Written reviews are what separate them: 9% of PowerChart Touch's written reviews are positive against 18% of AMSConnect's.
PowerChart Touch ships an update every 6 weeks, AMSConnect monthly. The most recent releases landed on October 13, 2026 and October 15, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | PowerChart Touch | AMSConnect |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 2.2 (204 ratings) | 2.2 (285 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 8.6% of reviews | 17.9% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 204 | 285 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 6 weeks | Monthly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 17.4 | 15.6 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 40 MB | 70 MB |
| Age rating | 17+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Cerner Corporation | American Messaging, LLC |
Customer experience
PowerChart Touch
AMSConnect
User reviews
PowerChart Touch
From 204 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 👍 Great functionality
- 🚀 Efficient workflows
- 👍 Ability to order
- 👍 Increased efficiency
- 👍 Crucial for patient success
Room to improve
- 🐛 Crashing often
- 🐛 Always asking to sign in
- 🐛 Very difficult to sign in
- 🐛 Getting worse
- 🐛 Pain in the neck
AMSConnect
From 285 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 🚀 Efficient messaging workflow
- 👍 User-friendly interface
- 🔒 Secure communication
Room to improve
- 🐛 Unreliable notifications
- 🔍 Poor search and archiving features
- 🔊 Lack of volume control for alerts
- 🔒 Security concerns with message access
- ⚠️ Frequent login issues
Bugs and requests
PowerChart Touch
Reported bugs
167 issues- Crashes often
- Always asking to sign in
- Difficult to sign in
- Getting worse
- Pain in the neck
Show 162 moreShow fewer
- Clunky
- Difficult to document
- Not even functional
- Very poorly made
- Requires sign in twice
- Not letting me log in
- Absolutely terrible
- Crashes in the middle of notes
- Saves nothing
- Useless
- Embarrassing
- Not useful for surgeons
- Incomplete
- Repeatedly gives system error
- Freezes
- Horrible
- Confused about Bluetooth call
- Chews through battery
- Frustrating in car
- Missing micro view
- Limited ordering ability
- Can only cancel fluids
- Not faster overall
- Essentially useless
- Only works for some specialties
- No OB or prenatal
- Won't bring up pdfs
- Can't pull up lists
- Almost good
- Clunky
- No better than Instanote
- Cannot function as stand alone
- Sign-in again and again
- Freezes up completely
- Cannot even re-download
- Years behind Epic’s Haiku
- Pretty useless for inpatient
- Terrible app
- Avoid if you can
- Login/logoff five times
- Infrequent Dragon integration
- Zero consistency
- Terrible product technical support
- Frequent unexplained downtime
- Surprise updates render unusable
- Horrible idea
- Cutting out crucial functionality
- Always freezes up
- Need to restart phone
- Freezes many times
- Requiring phone restart
- Crashes all the time
- Biggest problem Cerner’s emr has
- Inability to understand other languages
- Will not let me into the app
- Drains my battery
- Keeps crashing
- No tracking board views
- No micro results
- No image viewing
- Horrible user interface
- Lacks basic features
- Ordering medications missing
- Glaring feature disparities
- Long-standing deficiencies
- Slow to fix issues
- Unhelpful
- Very stressful
- Worse than old version
- Adds to stress
- Wastes time
- Freezing nonstop
- Constantly reinstall/restart
- Miserable
- Frequent shut downs
- Microphones not working
- Slow to upload
- Fundamentally lousy
- Stalls out
- Requires delete/reload
- Upgrade doesn’t work
- Frozen, won’t start
- Days longer playing with app
- Updated now not working
- Loop of log in/log out
- Loss of Physician Handoff
- Less intuitive UI
- Requires more steps to login
- Buggy
- Slow
- Almost useless
- Poor upgrade
- Even more disappointing than desktop
- Not intuitive
- Needs to cater better for Australian sites
- No way to create patient list
- Schedule viewing: open slots
- Last update broke app
- Errors with processing orders
- Unusable
- Missing ability to add providers
- App does not open
- Third rate app
- Clicks don’t work
- Power plans ill conceived
- Throw your phone in agony
- Improvement falls short
- Poor execution
- Archaic
- Horrific update
- Deleted ability to lookup schedules
- Utterly ridiculous
- Major stability issues
- Lost work
- Crashes at least once every note
- Search removed
- Cannot find patient
- Won’t let me sign in
- Disaster
- No customer service response
- Loss of flowsheets
- Viewing current labs first
- Clutter of old labs
- Placing orders slower
- Verification of patient physician relationship slow
- Microbiology not available
- Charge after discharge not accessible
- Medication history dosing not available
- Please fix the dictation
- Does not support new iPhones
- Observation Status Patients do not Show
- New update has issues
- Becoming more useful, still slow
- Slow loading speeds
- Pretty useless
- No microbiology
- Clunky
- Poor UI
- Rounding with this is limited
- Not intuitive to place/edit orders
- Slow migrating between patients/lists
- Discharged patients disappear
- Need MAR tab
- Domon face recognition
- No reason for re-login
- Unable to dictate certain histories
- Practically worthless
- Getting worse
- Logs out after 10 minutes
- Lab results display useless
- Goes back to patient homepage
- Still on previous day
- Clunky
- Unnecessary haptic steps
- Real estate taken by useless options
- Old version preferred
- Lost trend review for data
- Vitals not in trend view
- Labs not in trend view
- Data not timely/accurately updated
- Trending capabilities absent
- Dictation not used anymore
Requested features
31 requests- Add ability to add media from photo gallery/files
- Add medicine reconciliation capacity
- Add ability to open radiographs and images
- Include microbiology section
- Show Operating Lists
Show 26 moreShow fewer
- Show blood gas values
- Add Micro view
- Increased ordering ability (fluids, power plans)
- Make app faster
- Add OB or prenatal functionality
- Bring up PDFs
- Pull up lists from care teams
- Add lab notifications
- Add secure chat
- Add PowerPlans functionality
- Add ability to add providers in ‘Resource Selection’
- Bring back old functionality for provider schedules
- Ability to create patient lists
- Show available slots on schedule
- View other schedules
- Support new iPhones borders and screen
- Show Observation Status Patients
- Add Subjective, ROS, Assessment for dictation
- Improve slow loading speeds
- Allow viewing discharged patients
- Add MAR tab
- Add thumb/face recognition for login
- Dictate social history, family history, past medical history
- Restore trending graphs and detailed views of vitals and labs
- Add dark mode option
- Advanced analytics dashboard
AMSConnect
Reported bugs
4 issues- Inconsistent page delivery
- Unexpected logout and data loss
- Compatibility issues with iOS 16
- Glitches with service team management
Requested features
5 requests- Scheduling and on-call routing
- Apple Watch app integration
- Customizable alert sounds
- Ability to delete messages
- Improved CarPlay support
In-app purchases
PowerChart Touch
No in-app purchases
AMSConnect
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is PowerChart Touch free?
Is AMSConnect free?
Which has better reviews, PowerChart Touch or AMSConnect?
Do PowerChart Touch or AMSConnect have ads?
Which is updated more often, PowerChart Touch or AMSConnect?
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