eClinicalWorks vs. NextGen® Practice Management Solutions

If you love clicking around in a pretty EMR all day long then this is the EMR for you. [However, I believe] if you are looking for efficiency and support, you should look elsewhere. [I feel] this is an EMR clearly designed by the tech world without much attention or care for those who use it and if you look at the reviews carefully you see that most of the people who love it are in IT.

It's better than paper charting but it is still tedious and not efficient.

Incentivized

• Access to patient's records - obvious lack of file and charts; transportable ; multi user synchronous access
• Produces clinical note as end product that is organized and "readable" as opposed to the gibberish output of many EMR's that look like a poorly formatted FORTRAN printouts

• Ability to save favorite phrases and templates to make charting more efficient for providers.
• Ability to interface with Question Diagnostics for certain laboratory tests.
• Ability to send and receive tasks to other user(s) on the system as well as send future tasks and reminders to yourself.

Incentivized

• Meaningful Use Reports should be capturing data in real time and generated fairly quickly instead of the MAQ dashboard extraction process.
• Their support teams are not very helpful at certain topics such as the definition/logic of Meaningful Use calculations. These are generally difficult to determine but several cases in regards to Meaningful Use take several days before it gets addressed.
• Training videos would be helpful on their support website.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

If we had an option to easily switch to another EMR product we would. However, an EMR keeps you invested solidly in it - once you've started you're then going to be stuck with it. The investment into the data in the system are such that you have no real option to back out of what you are in and move into something else. Again, if we could, we would immediately move to another EMR. The ability to use it and be supported by the vendor has decreased nearly to the point of inability to use.

Incentivized

[In my opinion] the features allowed by the system are not designed for providers. [I think] the systems are inefficient, and new features tend to be "bolt on" features either as products purchased and added from other providers or simply a module created and strapped onto the software. There doesn't seem to be much idea around making things easier for the provider, though they like to state that provider burnout is something they are working on.

Incentivized

I often cannot assign a proper diagnosis under the assessment section; and as mentioned, sometimes (about once a month) the dictation just freezes because "the request has timed out" (even restarting the iPhone/ laptop does not help).

You put in support cases through a support portal. [I believe] for no apparent reason, the company decided that their support cannot have access to actual patient records and as a result, it's required that they have to connect remotely to a computer system in our network, and log in as one of our users to do anything. This also entails that they are completely incapable of diagnosing problems and require significant amounts of user input and time to try and begin any sort of work on the problems. [In my opinion] this takes away from patient care and other concerns. Also, while you can put in as detailed a ticket as you want, when you are called, you have to go over the ticket again, as they don't seem to read or care what you put in, as it's more important to them to go over everything in painful detail. Often times you must explain to the tech how the process works. In the past month, we were upgraded overnight with zero warning, which caused issues the following day as we had to update every single computer in our network (over 300) and it requires administrative privileges so couldn't be done by a user. This also doesn't update any information in the programs list, so there's no way to tell whether the update happened or not.

Incentivized

Paid for training, did not help. They trained prior to go-live, but it was so long ahead that users weren't able to function well when it actually happened, they seemed unable to provide adequate support. [In my experience] further support is typically very boilerplate, and is thus not useful, and has additional cost.

Incentivized

It's very important to limit your schedule during the weeks after go live but it is equally important to have a resource that is the lead at the practice that ensures that milestones are met leading up to the go-live date. Someone must be the point person at the practice otherwise milestones will be missed and the implementation will run into problems.

Incentivized

eClinicalWorks is above average for primary care outpatient services. It is not my favorite but it is not the worst either. ECW was selected by the group prior to my arrival so I cannot speak to why it was selected. I had an easy time adopting it but I have an extensive history of working with EMRs as a CMIO. As a company, they are constantly work to improve their product

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• I will just share one area that our organization saw the ROI in a very short time period. That is the elimination of a dictation service for most of our specialty group doctors when we introducec Dragon Medical. This functionality brought a tangible benefit and a significant ROI in a short time period.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized