I have worked in large hospitals with EHR technology. I was recently terminated from my job because when a patient is entered in our NextGen EMR system,a pop-up will show if a patient is denied services, meaning I am not allowed to refill his medication, the problem is if I go out of the patient to do something else and come back to it, the pop up will not come up again. This happended to me and I refilled a medication and was terminated because the people who terminated me have not worked with the system and do not believe that the pop-up never returned to the screen. This faulty trechnology cost me my job!!! If anyone wants to start a lawsuit, I'm in!

We have a provider-owned group of over 200 physicians, NPs and PAs. We've been on nextgen for about 5 yrs and are going through the 7.9 "upgrade" now for over 2 weeks. Unfortunately all the negative comments above are true. The program is on the level of Windows '95 (or worse) and I'm afraid 7.9 is just a sly shuffling of the same old crap. I have to think it's somewhat of a scam. I've loved electronic records and scheduling since my first exposure in the early 80's but this is SUCH a disappointment. And the more tech-savvy a provider is, the more they hate nextgen. In our daily lives we're using our iPads, laptops and phones with seamless, intuitive programming and then when we go to the clinic it's like traveling back in time... and the contrast grows sharper every day as nextgen continues to fall behind.

this program is the sole reason i don't want to go to work in the morning. when this hunk of junk was dropped on us, it was all horrible after that. our bosses won't acknowledge its really that bad. everyone is so angry now because of it but won't show it and it makes us all act out crazy sometimes. no one is helping us with it. we are alone on this. i even screamed out some obscene things to the consultant because she didn't know wtf to do.
*data entry is that much harder.
*new patients take about 80% longer than the old program.
*patient flow went from 1.5 hours to a whopping 2.75 hrs min.
*our billing people hate it too.
*the medics at work all hate the crappy, sloppy, sludgy piece of work.
*it is real tedious to check in.
*auto flow really is not what it states. rather it circles back and forth between tabs and tabs of info. quite the opposite, it makes you do things like "security" clicks.
*its just a really bad system for an ambulatory care setting.

I have used Nextgen for over 5 years and as soon as my contract with them was complete, I immediately switched to an alternative EMR. Their customer support is terrible and every additional feature or system is available only for significant additional cost. I would strongly recommend not using Nextgen. They don't offer appropriate training and additional training comes at additional cost.

And I thought I was just disgruntled about having to support NextGen. Yeah, under the hood it's shoddy as all hell, the "integrated" EHR and EPM were shoehorned together and the database and GUI is a sloppy mess, and the sales guys are slick pitchmen that hardly understand the product they're pushing. It gives me heartburn and anxiety and consumes vast amounts of everybody's time babysitting. Seems like it was built to create jobs, which ain't a bad thing unless you work in any normal company that doesn't want to hire an entire team devoted to supporting one system. Getting ready to go on the EHR soon. Yay!

I am having a problem in the settings on nextgen, under preferences in tools: my system seems to be set on "sucks" and i need to change it to "does not suck". where is the button for that, i cant seem to find it while taking 10 clicks to enter a diagnosis.

I am very computer savvy, and have worked with other EMR's in the past.
After using NextGen for a while, two things become apparent:
A) It was designed in pieces by numerous teams of programmers, none of whom actually talked with one another to come up with a consistent, unified system; and
B) The designers had very limited input from physicians.
The problems are far to numerous to outline below, but here are a few examples of the insanity I deal with on a daily basis.
-Templates exist for many problems, but not for some really common problems. So they have pre-made templates for Sjogren's and Peyronie's, but not conjunctivitis, or anxiety, or pre-operative history/physical.
-The medication prescribing module does not list the patient's drug allergies. The system will alert you to allergies/interactions/contraindications, but not when you select a medication; you have to wait until you have entered all the data and instructions and submitted it before you find out about a potential problem. And it will flag interactions and contraindications for any med that has EVER been prescribed to the patient with the system, even if he hasn't taken it in a year! Finally, it flags everything imaginable (like a warning against using Advair in asthmatics!)
-Some things just don't match up, so the part that allows you enter comments may accept 1000 characters, but the screen to read the comments only displays the 1st 300! Also, depending on where you enter data, it may or may not actually show up in the visible chart.
As before, I could go on and on and on, but you get the idea.
Let me leave you with these final pearls, which speak volumes. In 2008, the American Academy of Family Practice surveyed family doctors about their EMR's. NextGen ranked #10 out of 13 (not quite the worst, but pretty bad!) Of NextGen users, only 37% said they'd choose the same system again (I'll bet they never tried another system to know how good it could be!), and only 34% felt the system was worth the cost.

We are undergoing implementation now. This was forced on us by the corporate organization. I agree with the other posters. This system is definitely not intuitive. It also appears as it will consume volumes of time, not only now but for months to come. My contract is based on productivity and I am extremely alarmed.

I have an immediate need for a Project Manager for a NEXTGEN implementation in the Philadelphia area. If anyone is interested or knows anyone please reach out to me asap.

Jamie Feinstein 908-468-8644
jfeinstein@truebridgeresources.com
Senior Recrtuiter
TrueBridge Resources - North East Region

My resident program outpatient clinics use nextgen EMR while the main hospital uses Cerner/Citrix. Compared to the Cerner system Nextgen is ridiculously difficult to use, navigate, and input information into. I use it almost every day for a few hours so I am definitely an experienced user and know my way around computers. This product is crap and from what I hear pretty expensive. Stay far away is my advice.

NextGen does a great job selling a product, but a very poor job of supporting their product and their clients. The upgrade process is as others have mentioned, a nightmare. Customization? Sure for $250 an hour. Or you can hire an independent contractor for about half the cost. However - then the upgrade process becomes even more of a nightmare. Very steep learning curve, too much content that cannot be separated by specialty, and a cardiology product that looks NOTHING like the rest of the application. I would not recommend this software.

I am an implementation analyst/template developer with a large MSO, and we've been trying to implement NG EMR for over 3 years. I will give NG credit for recognizing the flaws in their templates and QA processes; NG has put a lot of effort into improving the core templates and fixing bugs. The upcoming 7.9 version of the templates looks very promising. But the previous and current versions were/are a mess, requiring several patches and client customization to fix all sorts of minor and critical errors. Upgrades to new versions of the templates are nothing short of nightmarish. The reviewer's claims of "seamless", "quick" and "effortless" navigation through the product are, to be polite, vastly exaggerated. The EMR product is difficult to implement, difficult to maintain, and requires advanced knowledge of template design and SQL to customize effectively. As I said, NG deserves kudos for attempting to address these problems. But small practices without strong IT resources should evaluate NG EMR very cautiously. Yes, it demos very well. The cardiology templates LOOK great, for example. But underneath the hood, it's a different and often frustrating experience.

How easily does NextGen work with scanning of the current charts or new paper that arrives on a daily basis?

when nextgen first came everyone was excited saying that it was user friendly. I have to admit when I first saw it I thought it was great. I work for Family Practice doctor and it worked for us immediately. But after a while I started to notice there were things that it can not do unless you really go out of your way for that convience. Getting labs back is still a huge issue. It does not show pending labs. So if we order 5 test only 4 show because the 5th one isnt done, but it doesnt show that the 5th one is pending so more labs are falling through the cracks...