NextGen Office vs athenaOne: Which is a better fit?

Jacque P.: Hi, I'm Jacque, and I'm a medical billing manager for a private medical practice and I give NextGen Healthcare three out of five star rating. We use NextGen Healthcare to do billing for our private practice. With three practitioners, it makes it easy to bill in one set area for all three of them at the same time, to send out claims and get the return EOBs to post to the remits. What I like best about NextGen Healthcare is the fact that it's super simple to use. When training new workers, they catch on easily because it's a very simple format that is laid out perfectly for anybody to just data input and send your claims off to get a return profit. I would have to say what I like least about NextGen Healthcare is the fact that when we need help, it seems to be very hard to get ahold of somebody. We do have a rep, but they have several people that I need to contact and it seems like I'm just being pushed off from one person to the next and when I do speak to somebody about a specific issue, it seems like if they're not very knowledgeable in that field, even though they would be IT, or my rep to get prices quoted, or have a technological issue that needs solved, it just seems very hard to get any issues resolved whatsoever. As well as the price that we were first told, it seemed to change very much throughout our contract, and we just constantly seem to have issues, especially with communication with NextGen Healthcare, unfortunately,

Katie: My name is Katie. I am the office director at Behavioral Health Clinic. We are about 20 staffs and my rating for athenaOne, the EHR/EMR system, is a five. Before the owner psychiatrist bridged off to start his own clinic and use athenaOne, we used a system at our old clinic. I don't know remember the name. It was from 1997, and it was F1s, F11s, F12s, and it was very, very old school, not a lot of information, and definitely needed an update. The owner and medical director psychiatrist chose athenaOne. Once he chose the system to use, I was the one that helped onboard and set up the entire system for scheduling, credentialing, insurance payers, adding schedules, doing all the portal settings, et cetera, like that. So I'm assuming he chose the platform, because it is such a nice interface and everything flows really well. To get started with athenaOne, it was actually pretty easy on certain platform systems for different departments, such as scheduling, setting up schedules, transferring patients. I know we had a little blip with the adding the insurance payers and the credentialing portion based off the account manager were provided. Granted, we were also in the middle of COVID, July 2020, so the blip was on both sides, but it was pretty easy after a couple months of what we got used to. And then once in-house staff used athena more often, we got used to all the settings, and we were able to internally figure out and troubleshoot with one another. The advice I would give for any company or clinic that is considering using athenaOne, I would give them that everything is all accessible inside athenaOne. You have scheduling. You have insurance verifications. You have portal messages. You have reports you can run. You can send out automatic email campaigns to patients. You can customize that even, so it's not going to all patients, it can only go to certain patients of the day. Here in Minnesota, we have snowstorms, so if patients are coming in the afternoon, we can set a little blip to be sent out to all the patients in the afternoon that we are closing early because of all the snow coming. And now, we don't have to manually sit and call every single patient, so it's all beautifully laid out in each tab in interface.