athenaIDX vs. NextGen Healthcare EHR

Athena is a well-suited electronic medical record system for those professionals that work in a medical center, hospital, clinic, and/or outpatient clinic that need to provide frequent and accurate documentation for insurance providers and all other members of the care team. It might be less appropriate for a small agency.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• NextGen has always stayed on top of the many changes every year and remained certified. I have seen many EHR companies go out of business or seen users have to change EHR systems in order to remain compliant for reporting.
• With NextGen, I am able to make a few customizations that my providers ask for to make their documentation easier. Not all EHR's are customizable. While it is not best practice to do a lot of customizations, sometimes it is worth the extra work to keep your providers happy!
• I love going to the NextGen User Group Meeting they have every year. I always learn things I didn't know and learn more about the things I do. They offer classes for everyone no matter what you do that pertains to NextGen. Even Government updates for healthcare.

Incentivized

• 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
• Ability to create custom reports

Incentivized

• NextGen completely misses the mark for ASCs, especially multispecialty.
• NextGen EHR constantly struggles with UDS reporting based on the EHR documentation.
• NextGen EHR struggles to compete because of automation. Most practices want to be dexterous, but it's not sustainable as we look to AI and automation.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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 expensive, has less features, is less modern, interfaces with our modern systems poorly and has actively created more manual work across the company. Each of the systems above are better in every conceivable way compared to this program.

NextGen Healthcare EHR is much faster and more reliable than IMS. We no longer have constant issues with the system being down during clinic. It is also much easier to navigate and for new employees to learn. We did not have training options or knowledge base available in the previous system.

Incentivized

• 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.

• electronic payment posting has saved us many man hours each and every month
• the ability to be able to code an encounter and upload to a clearing house in a matter of minutes has been a real time saver to our practice
• one task that has saved us much time without error is the check in check out process

Incentivized