NextGen Healthcare provides practice management solutions that support a patient-centric revenue cycle, enabling practices of all sizes to succeed in today's complex healthcare climate. According to the vendor, real-time clinical and administrative workflows help reduce physician burnout and achieve value-based reimbursement goals. The product is available on any device or platform, and helps automate patient registration, appointment scheduling, medical billing, claims processing, and…
In our experience, the integrated credit card processor breaks far too often which halts our ability as a business to schedule appointments (because they require a deposit) and accept client payments for services. Other functionality “breaks” or outages happen far too often for us to consider ClinicHQ reliable software.
To start, Nextgen PM is NOT well-suited for companies who are looking for a could-based product—you will be required to house this software on your own server (this will force that company to maintain their own infrastructure). The solution is great for a company looking for a PM/EHR combo that communicates well with each other. The two modules are owned by the same company and does not require a costly API/bridge to be built between the two programs.
In our experience, some basic functionality requires multiple steps to complete. Would like to see more efficiencies in the core functionality.
ClincHQ provides minimal support to clients. During our service period with ClinicHQ, there were only two employees available to all clients for support. There was no implementation management and support tickets lacked meaningful information and was usually not resolved to our satisfaction. We got most of our support/help with issues from other users in a Facebook group. Clinic HQ stated recently that they have nearly 500 clients. Hiring more employees to provide quality support to clients would be a plus.
Customer Service - Clinic HQ is privately owned. The owner is involved with support and is unprofessional, rude, and openly insulting to clients. In my experience, questions and feedback are taken as personal attacks and the owner attacks back. This has no place in business and is something we could not waste our time on since we have such a busy clinic. The messaging from the owner seems to be take it or leave it. I’ve never worked with a software company that operates this way. Listening to client feedback without taking offense and working with clients as partners would be a much better approach.
ClinicHQ has a dated user interface and could be upgraded to include more efficiencies in the core functionality. However, it is privately owned and it appears unlikely that they can do a major product overhaul/upgrade due to lack of funds.
Overall, a very easy and robust system to use for small practices. It enables us to keep billing in house and connectivity with various databases keep the providers "in the know" about what's going on with their patients. Some solutions - such as the patient portal and online scheduling are cumbersome and we have difficulty getting patients to use them.
We selected Clinic HQ as a brand new clinic because to us on paper they had everything we needed to run the business. In actuality, some of the software functionality did not work as advertised, and they lack quality support and support staff. They also seems to be loose with their software development methodology or lack it completely.
We feel that Nextgen does not stack up very well against the cloud-based software on the market. Housing the underlying tables on your own hardware requires COSTLY man hours. We are in the business of providing health care services to patients, not database administration. Introducing cloud-based products has had a tremendously positive effect on our business.
The monthly fee is $199 but, in our experience, the costs for the labor/time to resolve issues ourselves or work with support added about $200-$400 more in admin costs per month.
When there was a credit card processor outage, functionality in ClinicHQ was impacted so our clients could not schedule appointments because a deposit was required resulting in lost clients and lost revenue, appointment reminder emails and notifications could not be sent so we had a 10-20% no show rate on those days resulting in lost income, and clients could not pay online prior to check-out and instead had to wait in long lines for a staff member to manually key in their credit card data resulting in a very poor and frustrating client experience.
In our experience, the poor technical support and customer service was stressful and time consuming for our staff. Clinic HQ seems to value their time and costs over their clients’ time and costs. Because software is key to our high volume business and daily operations, we could not continue working with this software provider. Having only 3 U.S. employees to support U.S. clients, having outages of key functionality, and having no funding for major upgrades and new functionality were big drawbacks for us.
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.
