NextGen Office

What I like best is that it is cloud-based. I also like that I can scan and upload documents to the patient's chart, and when you pull up a patient, you can pretty much see all the information on your patient regarding demographics, insurance, authorizations, and what is outstanding.

There are many things I do not like about this product. Posting secondary payments is a hassle. You end up having to manually post most of the secondaries because this software gives your claim a new ID each time the claim is submitted. Even if paid by the primary and you create a secondary claim, there's a new claim #. This causes the secondary ERA payment to not know where to post the money. The claim number should stay the same for the life of that claim. Also, they tell you that you can look up the claim easily when posting a secondary claim by doing an advanced search by the patient's name. Most of the time, this is not the case. You end up having to click on multiple pages to find the claim number so you can post the payment.

I also am not a fan of the reports and the lack of filtering. Our sales guy told us that the software reports could be customized and if there was a report we wanted, we only had to ask. If there was an enhancement we wanted, we only had to ask. However, I can't even pay for a report or enhancement. When I ask for any enhancement, I am told it is not possible or that it will become part of the list, which never gets looked at apparently. Even the most simple request don't happen. For example, if an authorization is not active any longer, this should not print up on an authorization report forever. This causes the report to become gigantic. They will tell you that you can filter these things out yourself, but that is extremely tedious, especially after using the software over a long period of time and especially if this is a report you need to use every week.

Another thing about the reports is that many of them are not live. If you do work today, you can not see what is accurate until the next day. The reports will show you what was what as of close of business yesterday. Also, the salesman told us that they worked with almost every insurance company and therefore we would be able to check claim status, track claims, check eligibility, referrals. This was a large exaggeration. They have maybe five insurance companies that can do 1/2 of that.

Customer service is sometimes slow to respond, and they usually don't give very helpful answers when you send a written inquiry. The best thing to do is to call. But even then, they might not be able to help you because what you want, they simply don't have available.

Also the fee slips you will have available to use from their system are terrible. The options are very limited, and the font is extremely small and hard to read. I am a billing service, and all of my offices complained. When I asked if the font could be enlarged, I was told no, even though there was much room on the slip that was not used.

Training on this software was pretty much train yourself. You are allow three one-hour phone training sessions. You are given a lot of homework to do on your own first. If you can not make your appointment promptly, they will cancel it. If you are at your appointment but waiting on them, that is a different story. You have to do much of the setup with this software on your own, and it is not as simple as they would have you believe, especially exporting data from the old software to the new. They will tell you that if you can use an Excel spreadsheet, you can do it yourself. I had expert Excel spreadsheet staff do this for me, and it took forever to get it done. It was a nightmare and very expensive. This is because there are many requirements that are very vague. They offer pretty much no help.

If you have to resubmit a claim multiple times, all the claims get new claim numbers, and the claims you do not want stay in the claim history. This causes what you are looking at to be confusing. Even if you just have to resubmit a claim because the insurance says they do not have it on file, it stays on claim history with a new claim number.

Finally, when you have your insurances loaded in your payer list, they do not load with the addresses or phone numbers. You have to do this manually. Even when you do this and you want to print your aging report or work, the report shows without the insurance phone number or address. This is a large inconvenience when working your aging. It is also very hard to separate your insurance companies.