NextGen Healthcare

Commentaires: I have had providers leave a company when I needed them, and luckily have been shifted to a virtual visit at times in order to keep my medical conditions on a steady treatment path. I like Patient Portal communication because often it is simply to difficult to speak to you Professionals one on one. Medical records, EHR's, RX needs and face to face care still take place but can do so without such time or travel delays. Then a bonus of my information being intertwined with Companies using NextGen (of course with my consent) mean safer treatment options if I dissect the concepts here. I feel secure on the web and in seeking the best treatment for my concerns at any given point. This is a win/win for me.

Avantages: I chose to review this avenue because I am on the receiving end of many Health Care Professionals who are using telemedicine and health portals to provide smarter, faster and more streamlined medical care to millions of people. I happen to be one of those people. NextGen Population Health, and its general Patient Access Portals both play a huge role in my medical needs, physician to physician communication and my EHR's as a whole. Electronic Health Records to me are critical. I have a few specialists and I love the ability to have them accept my permission to review my records and such. Just a smart way whether you are a traveler, stay at home worker or an everyday "Joe". Patient safety in my idea here is also upped, leaving less room for critical errors that could arise. A Wonderful Platform I have used as a general Portal for over 5 years, and more recently teleconferencing for a specialist these last few months. Very patient oriented and available when often the world seems booked.

Inconvénients: I am hoping that the Company concept will continue to impact Physician/Patient/Peer communications and flow quickly into the offices of most Practicing Medical Professionals. My downside has been virtually nothing. I still use a former Physician group in another major city where I received medical care for several years and relied on their Patient Portal powered by NextGen. I keep my specialists on their portals and search them for my needs based on my own chart with them. It is easy and right there. I have seen no hippa related issues and I get what I need for efficiency out of it. I have no cons except its under-utilization. I do respect that for some, this idea is not an ideal fit, so regular visits and records should never end for those who use something related to their well being in an alternative, standard capacity such as in person needs.

Commentaires: In 2006, a 3rd party integrator (no longer in business) sold NextGen to our organization and since this was their first time installing it, the installation and configuration was barely implemented. To mitigate, in 2011, additional Practice Management training from NextGen and EHR Training/template development resources from Ciscon were engaged to review billing processes and create clinical workflows. Thanks to NextGen/Ciscon, we were able to launch the EHR in 2013. Since then, they have helped us make significant improvements to the clinical workflow (customizing templates) and billing processing. In 2016, the NextGen reports allowed us to start receiving CMS Meaningful Use/ACI incentive funds.

Avantages: 1. Highly configurable...an organization can develop/program/configure any template or drop-down list box to tailor it to their clinical staff! 2. Software includes everything a clinic/hospital needs...and with NextGen's MirthConnect product, any interface or integration to another system is possible and easy! Besides the EHR and Practice Management, NextGen provides a Patient Portal, ePrescribe capability, Rosetta and MirthConnect (allowing interfaces to any system like LabCorp, Quest, Immunization Registries.), and much more! 3. NextGen Support is awesome...and if there is a new staff member, just request Tier 2 or Tier 3 support techs so your challenges are addressed quickly by experts in every area of the product! 4. NextGen Training is helpful from knowledgeable and experienced staff who have worked in clinical and front office environments. For any upgrades or projects, or if you are brand new, leverage the advanced trainers for additional training for staff and learning how to utilize/configure the system by having them review your configuration. 5. NextGen Development and NextGen 3rd Party Integrators (like Ciscon) are amazing to work with...If you don't have time to develop templates or learn, contact them to obtain a quote. I have been most impressed with support team at Ciscon! They have been able to streamline Provider templates and save tons of clicks so the Providers just adore and appreciate the efforts! They were also able to train all the clinical staff on the new workflows.

Inconvénients: Like any EHR (vs a paper chart), there are lots of clicks for the clinical staff members.
In addition, the graphical user interface was so new to staff, this caused delays in the encounters.
(To mitigate, we spent time, money, and effort on training users as well as building customized templates...This was worth every penny!)

Commentaires: In 2015, I spent countless hours reviewing/sampling one EHR after another to find a good fit for what we needed/wanted in an EHR. We were moving from paper and wanted a cloud-based solution. As a dermatology office, we absolutely need the ability to document patient's skin findings on a diagram. HealthFusion was one of the few that gave this ability and even allowed us to upload our own images which we have designed for quick easy use. Most dermatologists will utilize a more derm-specific product such as Modernizing Medicine's EMA, PracticeStudio, etc, however, another criteria we wanted in our EHR was something that was truly platform-independent and browser-independent -- could work on a ChromeOS computer, a Mac, a Windows machine, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Edge, Internet Explorer, etc. Again, MediTouch's HealthFusion EHR & Practice Management product provided this capability while other derm-specific products did not and continue not to. We also do our billing in-house and wanted a robust billing product. MediTouch is their own clearinghouse which is a big benefit so when there are issues, we don't hear from our vendor "Oh it's a problem with the Clearinghouse", instead MediTouch customer service tells us "Oh we need to fix that". Customer service is overall very good - it is here in the United States (Pacific Coast which is our local time zone) and available relatively quickly. So why not five stars? Well, the EHR itself is not designed very well for a specialty-specific practice like ours so we went through a process of customizing it for our needs. We are happy that customization was available however it was a daunting and time consuming process. While the EHR system allows for some meaningful use and PQRS measures it does NOT collect data for specialty-specific measures so it's basically useless for our PQRS/MU/MACRA reporting needs. Which is very unfortunate and might force us to move to a derm-specific product.

Avantages: Platform-independent (works on ChromeOS, MacOS, iOS, Android, etc.)
Browser-independent (works in Chrome, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc)
Cloud-based with no need for specific hardware/software in-house.
Local to our time zone (Pacific) with U.S. based customer service
Clearinghouse is in-house with the vendor
Speed of operation - there have been moments when the cloud-based

Inconvénients: Lack of specialty-specific Meaningful Use, PQRS, and MACRA measures
Need for heavy customization for the purposes of documenting specific scenarios (specialty or otherwise)
Extra components within standard documentation unnecessary for most specialties
Integration of PM and EHR could be a bit better

Avantages: They are improving the product consistently. There have been two product updates since we started with them in March. Customer service has improved greatly as well. 99% of the time someone who picks up the phone and helps you with your problems. They have daily webinars that are free of a particular topic, so you can log in, ask questions, get help, and then log off. The product has a lot of great things such as ease of sending the charges from the docs to the billing department, seeing the exact statement that a patient received so you can talk to them more intelligently, getting lots of detail on the claims, rescheduling a patient from one day to the next, and blocking a portion of the schedule or opening a portion of the schedule.

Inconvénients: You can submit issues via email, but once they respond back, they close the case. Even if they didn't give you the answer you were looking for, you then have to email again and reference the case requiring you to print everything to keep track, because there is no way to follow the status of your case. If you submit feature requests, there is no way to know if they are working on it, aren't considering it, holding it for a future update, etc. There are specific reports that you can get, but if you need something that's not pre-built, there is very little way to obtain the info, if at all. I requested some kind of report writer. The reports all come out as an Excel spreadsheet which is good, because it allows you to manipulate and move around the data, but when you print it's very unwieldy and not pretty. They need to have a way to convert the report to a PDF format once you have it the way you like. Many of the reports don't offer options such as picking providers, locations, payers, so you have to manipulate the report after it opens to delete what you do not need, which is time consuming. The software is extremely dependent on location, which means everything you do has to be done by location creating a lot of work. If you have many offices, your docs do surgery in several locations and they are outpatient or inpatient. Changing or adding something has to be done many times, because you do it by location. It would be easier if there was a drop-down listing your locations and you only had to check the locations to which your additions or changes were applicable. Parts of the software feel as if they are too structured and everything has to fit into their predetermined way to do things. There is not enough flexibility and leeway to change portions that suit your practice. Vendor training was not great when we started and we paid for an outside vendor that works with Healthfusion to come on site and train us. I understand that the help and training portions have changed a bit since then and may be better. It has great potential if they would open up the software and be more flexible!

Commentaires: We are a single physician clinic in rural Texas. My physician is also my husband, and he is a board certified Family Practice osteopathic physician practicing in the same clinic for almost 30 years now. Our clinic is busy, and my staff is small. Employees are cross-trained in medical assisting and clerical duties and often cover each other depending on patient needs and/or staff absences. Having MediTouch PM software has given me a peace of mind, regarding patient care business needs, that I never had with prior computer programs. The system gets the insurance information correct and the insurance forms completed so much better than anything I've used in the past 15 years or more. I have less missed charges thanks to the patient page showing the listing of a patient's office visits. If the charges have not yet been entered, there is an "ENTER" beside the date just waiting to be clicked. This better assures the correct dates are posted. Staff uses the recall options to follow up on patient care and schedule future appointments with less chance of letting a patient slip by without follow up. The Electronic Remittance Advice documents are wonderful - no more paper and everything in one place. The search options allow us to go back to anything as needed. Automatic posting saves time and frees staff for other tasks. At present, we are operating with one less staff member as when we first began to use the system. As the physician's manager and wife, I appreciate that I can work on this day and night (for better or worse) without being tied to the clinic building. I am here at my home desk completing this review right now. I can finish posting claims, follow up on denied claims, generate and print statements all without carrying home boxes of papers. Having the data for both management and health records stored off-site is a blessing to me. The constant fear of system crashes and failed backups is over. I do not have the burden of upgrading to newer and more powerful servers at the clinic, but can use money to by better single computers that can connect with HealthFusion remotely and not to a central in-house server system. I am still learning many aspects of the system, and anything not yet learned is entirely my own fault as HealthFusion has improved the training materials greatly over the past year. They are now easy to find and access. My time is all that needs to be planned because they have done everything else for us. Reports are available if I want them, too. I have seen our clinic income increase; payments come more quickly and less error thanks to the MediTouch PM system. Whenever I do find areas that I think need attention, the customer service is quick to respond and have taken my suggestions into implementation on a few occasions. They are very personable and professional whenever we call, although I tend to use email when possible. The replies are quick and complete. We signed up for the programs in November 2010 based on promotional programs that were offered via the American Osteopathic Association. We didn't jump in to actually using the product until the following June when e-prescribing was required. If I could go back, I would have started the programs' use much earlier. I was simply afraid to jump in and leave our old systems behind. To my surprise, the transition has been easy. Thank you very much for the chance to share this experience. I do not mind providing more details if needed.