Epic Cadence is the company's medical scheduling module.
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NextGen® Practice Management Solutions
Score 7.1 out of 10
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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…
Cadence Enterprise Scheduling is particularly useful in a multiple provider, multiple location scenario. It is also quite useful in situations where there are multiple rooms or pieces of equipment that need to be scheduled.
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.
The system is simple to use it helps schedulers create appointments and, avoids placing patients in situations where they are scheduled at the same time in different facilities.
It has many reports that can help managers maintain a smooth operation and shows what areas need to improve.
It has a one place for all scheduling information for schedulers to see patient's appointments, especially when patients do not recall where or when their next appointments will be.
The system can be created in such a way that you can control who can make appointments and who can't.
They system when built provides warnings to schedulers helping to minimize many scheduling errors like overbooking.
Questionnaires: EPIC seems to be very stringent on questionnaires and how may can be attached (only 1) on a Cadence level causing us to be quite inventive on how to get questioned answered on only certain visit types. One big stumbling block was the Ebola questionnaire. Currently we have a particular questionnaire for new Phy. Therapy patients which prevents us from adding the Ebola questionnaire to NEW patients. We are still struggling with this.
Patient Itinerates used for multiple appointments: Not very professional looking regardless of how you set up (OP visits, instructions etc: Most practices will not use the itinerary therefore adding dollars to having printing cards with the practice name on them. (the old fashioned way)
Building new DEP records: Wish there was a way to copy entire builds from one DEP to another.
Security": EPIC security is a nightmare to develop for multi faced users. RN that schedule appointments. Many of our practices are small practices that only have 2-3 people (the doc, the RN and the scheduler/biller . This creates the need for everyone to do everything from a scheduling perspective and building this security can become very cumbersome from practice to practice as each is unique.
As stated earlier, it seems to be the best out there, from a built perspective as well as a user application. While some practices feel it to be time consuming (Cadence/Prelude) together others who see the whole integration thru the Epicare and Resolute systems love it. From an IT perspective, while sometimes cumbersome to build, the end results are pleasing and satisfying. We can usually accomplish what we set out to do with the practice vision in mind.
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.
EPIC has been great in their support and communication at all hours. They also openly communicate when an application TS (Technical Support) will be away and who is covering for that person. During standard non working hours - you always know what number and who to call to get resolution to issues that arise at those times
Use implementation team from EPIC but know what you want and make sure that it=s what you get. You can be easily swayed by lack of knowledge on the application and therefore decisions are made that are not correct and then have to be redone. EPIC including Cadence needs a great understanding of the workflows you currently have and how they will be impacted by your build. We had a great understanding of the existing workflows in the offices, however lack of knowledge on the Cadence IT side, had a large impact on what was delivered as our implementers believed that a standard EPIC workflow would suffice and did not.
Centricity was limited in ability to scale and customize compared to Cadence for our environment. Also the regular updates for Cadence vs. Centricity is where Cadence really shines. Vendor support is also much better with Cadence over Centricity. We also like the robust capability of the reporting module in Cadence over other vendors.
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.
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.
