athenaIDX is an on-premise or cloud-hosted enterprise RCM solution that helps health systems, hospitals, billing services, and large practices optimize financial performance and successfully adapt to healthcare payment reform. It is based on the Centricity medical practice and EMR software that was formerly owned and supported by GE Healthcare acquired by Veritas Capital in 2018, spun off into a new entity (Virence Health), and then rebranded as a product of athenahealth (also a Veritas…
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NextGen Healthcare EHR
Score 8.2 out of 10
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NextGen Healthcare provides ambulatory practices of all size solutions along with dedicated support and professional services. NextGen® Enterprise EHR offers practices configurable clinical content, workflows, and an integrated patient experience platform that incorporates telehealth. With NextGen® Mobile, providers’ smartphones become an extension of the EHR, saving time. NextGen has its own fully integrated solutions that provide dictation, speech-to-text, direct to desktop and Ambient…
I couldn't recommend IDX to anyone. Most of the reviews on this site appear to be for the program that broke off from Athena IDX, Centricity Practice Solutions (CPS). CPS is a much more capable program managed by Unlimited Systems (a separate company) that should NOT be confused with Athena IDX (managed by Athena Health). It's possible that Athena IDX was usable in the 90s compared to other peer programs at that time, but there are so, so many better, modern solutions available now for far less money. This software is priced at the enterprise level with a level of quality that is below budget tier with an ancient feature set to boot.
For Primary Care and Behavioral Health Providers in the outpatient setting, NextGen Healthcare EHR is the leading solution because of its ease of use, setup, and workflow customization. It has additonal software like Dental and Population modules that are great tie ins to the EHR that make hand offs and other specialties workflows work seamlessly.
One of the best things about Centricity is it is flexible. We are able to add a data point behind a term (CPS calls this an observation term) and track any data needed. These observation terms also allow us to pull information forward and display information needed to make a good decision or used to decrease errors. For example in our history forms given to the patients one of the questions is side of injury. This affected side displays on our EMR forms which helps providers and prevents mistakes.
CPS integrates with other programs. We are paperless and use DocuSign to send each patient their history, ROS and all new paperwork. This allows us to import the history into the forms and has saved us from adding extra staff (FTEs) to room and take history. The history form can be completed at home or in the waiting room. Each section has a observation term behind it and allows it to be placed into the note at the correct section. Since we have a fully integrated product we do not have to have another program to enter or transfer our charges from the EMR to the PM side of the program.
Our notes look great! We did a lot of customization which gave us the detail and look we wanted. It seems like a lot of work at first, but the outcome has so much efficacy. We increased our providers without having to increase our staffing and it is due to he efficiencies we gained by using the EMR.
One other note, Centricity is flexible but that means it is complicated. You can not have flexibility without it be complicated don't let that stop you the end results can be great.
it is easy to create an appointment for a patient. The system is easy to use. It can easily show you when the next appoint is and also has pop up system alerts that the staff can view as to any special things that may need to be done before that appointment is created
Adding charges from an encounter is effortless, creates the claim and is sent to the clearing house and onto the payer. This process is all documented
one of the best features I like is that in the background is that NextGen documents every user's actions as to what is being done to the patient's chart. As a manager I can view what has happen over time with the patient's chart and easily repair what's needed
Statements print only current open accounts, would be nice to print a total statement for patients so they can see if payments are split between open and closed/zeroed out accounts
The usability of the product is great. The difficulty that we have is in the background with the speed of servers or of things loading. If there are any issues with the remote server, things can really slow down drastically.
Pages load quickly and reports are uploaded quickly. It just takes far too many clicks to get anything complete in this program. If a patient wants to pay for something after we have checked them out of their appointment, or wants to make an appointment it is not efficient. In a busy practice like ours efficiency is key and we need to keep the flow going
Tier 1 support is useless. They gather details we've already provided and have no idea how to help us. Techs just call rather than scheduling an appointment which means we are in the middle of something else and our internal IT is unavailable to provide appropriate connection. Webex details aren't provided in advance of the call so it's difficult to get connected timely to have a conversation in real time during the support session. Many issues drag on for months and tickets get closed without resolution. It's a "known issue" is the most unhelpful response to a recurring problem. UGM Learning Lab is perfect because the issues based experts are there! It would be ideal to always be connected like that in real time
Training consists of overly specific points with no general process considerations. Trainers will regularly go 'into the weeds' on pointless edge cases while the meat of the training still needs to be addressed.
Athena IDX is more reliable than other platforms. It rarely has latency challenges where it has to be intermittently shut down or updated. It is accessible on multiple devices and overall, easy to use and navigate.
NG is like no other software I have ever used. I thought if you used one software they are all alike. Not this software, it is totally different but let me tell you very thorough and it also can track anything that anyone has done in a work day. Good auditing system.
Extremely expensive software for the limited feature set. We're talking millions of dollars with off hours support (anything outside of 8-6EST) that starts at $1200 for the first hour and $300 for each hour afterwards.
Multitasking isn't a thing unless you assign more licenses (thereby increasing your costs). Users can quite literally only have one IDX window open at a time unless you assign more licenses. This slows down everyone as there are plenty of times where examining different parts of a patient's profile is useful.
Reporting has been nearly impossible as we use modern reporting software. IDX's analytics site is firmly stuck in the 1990s and lacks decades of innovation present in something like Power BI.
Nickel and diming philosophy. A limited API server costs ~$10k/month. Setting up a new facility in IDX costs you and requires a 4 month lead time. Many more instances of this.
While in some cases, NextGen Healthcare EHR improves efficiency, most practices are not able to reduce staff, they usually have to actually have .5-1 more employees per physician or midlevel provider. These employee roles change and shift throughout the implementation and into the adaptation process. Those staff generally slowly transition to where they are needed next.
