How NextGen EPM Usability Can Increase Productivity

There are many moving parts within a healthcare practice, and to work efficiently, you must stay on top of all the variables. Management of your practice's revenue cycle is an essential aspect of maintaining a healthy bottom line. Improving the usability of NextGen Practice Management (NextGen EPM) revenue cycle solutions are critical to meeting financial goals and employee satisfaction.

Getting the right solution is crucial to your continued operational success. What are the right NextGen EPM solutions to implement at your practice? Usability must be of utmost priority because unusable software ruins any inefficiencies potentially gained. Usability is a product of efficiency, efficacy, and satisfaction – users must do what they need to as quickly as possible; that's how they'll keep using it. The right practice management support and solutions implemented increases efficiency by intuitively merging the technical and business sides with your healthcare practice's clinical team.

In this article, learn about NextGen's EPM solution, and just how its usability can help you increase productivity for better patient service and practice management.

What is NextGen EPM Usability?

The usability of NextGen EPM is defined as the efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction with which different users can accomplish their set tasks within an environment. The system must be intuitive, meaning it requires minimal mental effort from its users to perform their daily functions. A solution that providers a quality user experience anticipates each process and supports users at each turn.

Why should you care about NextGen EPM usability? Your users' experience affects virtually everything in your practice, from patient safety and clinician satisfaction to productivity and profitability. Some experts even state that it's the single most important quality for choosing a new practice management solution.

Benefits of Using NextGen EPM

NextGen EPM is a robust system that automates and streamlines the scheduling, administrative, and billing aspects of healthcare practice management. Its features are specifically designed to manage the business functions without which the practice's clinical services would become inefficient and less profitable. Some of the many features of NextGen EPM include management of patient appointments, billing, and statements, task assignments, claims automation, and reporting. Use of NextGen EPM with NextGen EHR allows for seamless integration from the clinical documentation to the back office billing processes, which means more accurate billing and less data entry for staff.

NextGen EPM carries a host of benefits for your practice, most notably:

Automated Billing Tasks

NextGen EPM offers a powerful tasking system that allows teams and individuals to manage outstanding billing items in their Worklog queue automatically. This queue creates a standard, repeatable approach to accomplish billing items within the NextGen application. Having the ability to work tasks from a central location saves time, effort, increases revenue output, and allows managers to track productivity and items yet to accomplish.

Key features of NextGen EPM worklog tasking include:

• Worklog tasks to define task types and assign them to specific groups or users

• Provision for distinct tasks for insurance verifiers, billers, and charge entry staff

• Generate tasks directly from NextGen EPM reports

• Easy to track tasks

• Management of completed vs. outstanding items

• NextGen EPM Autoworker can define and create tasks as well as auto-complete tasks based on certain criteria

• NextGen EPM Autoworker can automatically write off balances 

Use of the NextGen Background Business Processor (BBP)

The NextGen Background Business Processor (BBP) allows you to automate processes that would have been executed manually. Automation will enable you to relieve performance issues by reducing database traffic by handling non-urgent processes during off-peak hours. Employees who were repeatedly doing manual tasks can be reallocated for higher productivity tasks.

The BBP does the mundane and repetitive tasks from your workflow, allowing teams to focus on more complex needs that demand human intervention. You can use the BBP to automatically:

• Bill encounters and scrub claims

• Create claims files

• Import ERA files

• Post balanced batches

• Run large reports

• Merge patients

• Import claim status

• Run eligibility with RTS

• Import documents

By automating tasks, you improve NextGen EPM usability, and your teams have time to manage follow-up required on any outstanding items.

Manage Patient Appointments with NextGen EPM

Use flexible appointment-booking tools to centralize calendars across different locations. Configure resource schedules and apply exceptions easily to meet the needs of all staff and patients. A proper schedule is critical to ensure your patients can be seen promptly as well as provider productivity. The process of setting up a schedule can seem tedious at times, but the NextGen EPM scheduling admin offers many solutions to even the most complex of scheduling needs. Patient appointments can then be linked to your EHR encounters for accurate billing of claims.

Clearinghouse Integration with NextGen EPM

NextGen EPM integrates directly with most clearinghouse solutions. By utilizing NextGen BBP you can easily create 837 claim files and automatically upload to your clearinghouse. Then you can automatically import claim status files. Implementing these features improves your NextGen EPM usability, and gives you quick access to a complete claims management platform in your EPM. Tackle the toughest financial and administrative challenges with all tools and resources within NextGen EPM. This change also allows you to reallocate resources who were manually managing all of these processes.

Generating NextGen EPM Statements

Within the NextGen EDI statement solution, statement generation processes are automated, and you can tailor your statement information and messages according to your practice's unique needs. Ensuring you have the right information on statements is crucial to receiving the correct payments from patients. No one in your practice should be printing and mailing statements anymore.

NextGen EPM Memorized Reports

Have you ever generated a report and wished you could save it as a favorite? NextGen memorized report functionality allows you to do just that. You can create reports to track specific items like payment postings, charge entries, and other patient encounter details for better patient and billing management. You can also send tasks to other users directly from these reports. Save yourself even more time by generating the reports on NextGen BBP to run automatically when you need them.

NextGen EPM Tools Integration

Integration with NextGen RTS and NextGen Charge Review Rules Engine helps you capture revenue at the lowest possible cost, thanks to charge custom coding and charge creation in the Rules Engine. RTS verifies patient insurance eligibility for accurate and reimbursable, and you can check claim status in real-time.

How Can TempDev Help?

Creating a highly efficient and usable NextGen EPM is integral to running a successful revenue cycle group. TempDev can help you discover solutions and pain points you might not realize are hurting your productivity. 

Our team at TempDev can help you to:

• Ensure your claims are going out promptly and accurately

• Ensure your teams are working to the full potential of their skillset

• Take out the repetitive tasks by setting custom automation parameters to give accurate results

• Perform NextGen EPM optimization and assessment review

• Custom develop solutions that don't currently exist

Reporting is a critical aspect of any healthcare EPM deployment. Out-of-the-box NextGen reports may not adequately capture your productivity data and parameters to give accurate reports. Our NextGen EPM reports can help. You can also use TempDev's proprietary Revenue Cycle Dashboard, which allows you to see appointments, A/R, and other parameters from one dashboard. You can also implement our Front Desk Audit to track staff efficiency or use the E & M Coding Report to compare code habits.

Finally, our TempBill solution is tailored for NextGen staff augmentation for revenue cycle optimization, payment posting, and accounts receivable management. Update your billing and collections to improve your revenues and see greater profitability within weeks. Our consultants will work with your team to make your NextGen EPM deployment work better for your practice and needs.

Contact the TempDev NextGen EPM Consultants on 888-TEMP-DEV and get the best NextGen EPM deployment with impressive usability and everything your practice needs.