athenaClinicals vs NextGen® Practice Management Solutions

• Quality programs - able to see what measures are outstanding for the patient
• Reporting - able to report on multiple financial reports as well as clinical information
• Standardization of clinical information - the system forces users within the same specialty to use the same templates (as a starting point), therefore it is easier to standardize protocols and treatments of care

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• Scheduling patients always felt very intuitive. We do not use the feature often, but we have the capability of copying and pasting appointments throughout the template.
• When transitioning between the PM and EHR module, the software is great about keeping the same patient active in either window.
• If a practice desires a product which is housed on-premise (on a company-owned server), Nextgen will satisfy that need/desire.

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• There are many areas where Athena can improve. The support for surgery centers is non-existent. I was told that 2017 was going to be the year of the surgery center with opportunities to improve the system for that application. This never happened and the team that was supposed to assist me was disbanded.
• The list of prior surgeries is cumbersome and difficult to use unless you happen to know the CPT code for the procedure. We end up choosing the closest procedure that we can find and making a note to clarify what we are listing.
• The medication administration module is hard coded and cannot be changed. There are options that are absolutely ridiculous but we are told that they must stay that way. For example, an IV fluid rate is set at ml per minute rather than the standard of ml per hour. IV start sites are anything from the hand to rectal. When you give a medication it assumes that you are doing so based on a verbal order and requires that you document the verbal order. We give meds based on written orders almost all the time.

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• The software requires annoying/disruptive updates.
• The software is housed on our own server. We have found that cloud-based solutions are much more convenient.
• At times, the system is a bit "slow."
• The canned reporting/BI tool is not as malleable as many of the other solutions we have used and/or trialed.
• We were able to achieve cost-savings through some other systems.

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• Nextgen did a good job of transitioning our practice away from paper health records.
• I believe that the Return on Investment would have been much higher had we gone straight to a cloud-based tool.
• By getting our feet wet with Nextgen, we have a pretty good understanding of Practice Management software. In other words, we could plug and play with most systems on the market.

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