NextGen Healthcare-Still a leader in Patient/Physician communication

This was a Premiere Patient and Physician portal many years ago and worked so smoothly. I did live in another state, but happily when researching my info for older records, this Portal was still there and had all I needed. I did not pursue moving items to another portal that some of my doctors use today since they seems to be on an ever evolving and ever revolving system of chaos on some of the models being implemented currently. This wasn't broken, so I wish it had stayed for many other people. But a refreshing relief to still find it and get to use it. It may be working in other parts of the world and in those places I hope that the users feels as good as I do about it.

Pros

I needed to find some older records from another place and time. My portal still was available from 2014 and I had many and virtually all options available to me despite being in other Physician based web portals over the years. Beyond Helpful.

Cons

I only dislike that it is phased out in many common places and dominated by more complex systems. I experienced this issue recently at a physicians office.

family physician review

I'm overall happy. Every EHR system has its pros and cons, but I believe Nextgen Office has a very good combination of ease of use and overall cost.

Pros

It is very easy to complete my notes at the time of examination of the patients

Cons

whenever an upgrade or maintenance is completed over a weekend, many times we run into problems coming back to work on that Monday. For examples, slowness, screen freezes up, etc. The latest incident was this past weekend. It was eventually corrected on the Monday, but it slows us down.

NextGen is flawlessly architected

This software goes from engaging a patient to diagnosis, treatment, script, and billing. It is efficient and flexible, allowing customization for each user. And the staff of NextGen is outstanding in training and running the product and in their enthusiasm and passion for it and for improving healthcare delivery.

Pros

This software not only provides for all aspects of EHR and admin in medical practices, it actually saves providers' time, allowing it to be better spent on patient care than on admin.

Cons

I would like to see more open API's to allow software development with complimentary proprietary products. The good news is that NextGen appears willing to explore such opportunities.

Great potential, but needs some improvement!

Pros

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.

Cons

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!

Healthfusion

I would rather use Nextgen than the software Amazing Charts we use now. Nextgen was much easier on the billing side.

Pros

I liked the Practice Management side because of the use of easement. I liked the tabs at the top of the page to navigate and I also liked the side tab to look at previous visits without getting out of one screen.

Cons

The clinic side was nice, however, we were not connected to the Immunization Registry. I didn't like the fact that we had to pay fee's when we did the E-fax. I also didn't like the billing side of Nextgen. It was hard to get ahold of someone that could help me downgrade the software. When I finally did the rep was very rude and made me feel like I did something wrong. She should've just called me instead of email.