Meet Sarah Woods: Senior NextGen Development Consultant

Sarah Woods, Senior NextGen Development Consultant at TempDev, is a master of many facets within the healthcare space. In fact, her first position, as an athletic trainer with a training degree from the University of Indianapolis, became a stepping stone that positioned her well for her future career with TempDev. 

Sarah Woods has always loved computers—a passion passed down to her by her tech wizard father. As an athletic trainer, she honed her craft at a physical therapy clinic and performed outreach training at high schools and middle schools in Indiana. She was stimulated by the hands-on, people-facing nature of this work. However, her inane curiosity and love for computers filled her personal time. She taught herself to program outside of her physical therapy position. Eventually, her newly acquired skill became useful in her physical therapy clinic, when she helped build customized physical therapy & orthopedic template sets for NextGen EHR.

Her love of development led her to pursue a career at TempDev, where Sarah has spent her nine-year tenure working on a broad range of projects. These include clinical projects that combine her expert usage of template development, SQL, and SSRS reports to build comprehensive solutions that physicians rave about. She also has spent time creating innovative financial solutions that reimagine patient balances, bad debt, and nuanced claim submissions to revenue cycle teams delight. Her depth of experience spans a variety of specialties where her knowledge is unparalleled including Planned Parenthood, ASC, behavioral health, cardiology, family practice, orthopedics, obstetrics, gynecology, labs, and orders.

Her years of experience and hands-on knowledge of different types of healthcare organizations have led her to form lasting relationships with many of her clients. They see her as an extension of their team who can always be relied upon. She brings intelligence, innovation, and kindness to every engagement she is assigned to.

"I have a very good relationship with a lot of my long-term clients. They know they can confide in me, and that they can trust that I’ll get the job done and understand their needs. We have a good rapport and that goes a long way."

To know Sarah Woods of TempDev, is to understand that when it comes to Orders in NextGen, there is no one that understands it better. From the front end user workflow, to the back end tables the data resides in, and to the Mirth interface it travels over: Sarah understands it all. She has helped with the design of the My Plan template, given feedback on ordering in the Immunizations Module, assisted countless clients with any ordering projects they can dream of, and helped TempDev develop their custom ordering templates. If you can Order it, Sarah can make sure it's happening in NextGen as efficiently and accurately as possible.

Among some of Sarah's proudest accomplishments at TempDev are that she helped develop and maintained TempDev's NextGen EHR Flu Clinic Template. Every year she updates the template to maintain compliance with flu updates and assists our clients with their upgrades.

Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic was painfully spreading across the country many of our clients needed a way to test in high volumes. Sarah worked with one of our clients to build the COVID-19 Testing Template to allow for rapid scheduling, ordering, and resulting of COVID-19 tests. Her innovation saved nursing staff countless hours and millions of clicks so they could better spend their time taking care of patients.

At work, Sarah is invigorated by any opportunity where she gets to interact with NextGen directly to make the tool better. She worked multiple times with NextGen on EHR KBM changes, including Planned Parenthood, behavioral health, general CCDA requirement updates. At the time this was written, she was working with them on an Orthopedic Ambulatory Surgery (ASC) Template Suite update. 

Outside of work, Sarah is a family-oriented Mom of three. She loves playing computer games with her dad and her kids, and attending comedy shows from comedians like Bill Engvall and Ron White. As a military family, her husband is in the Army, they have moved nine times to places like Oklahoma, Colorado, Maryland, and Indiana where she’s originally from.

Aside from her hometown, Colorado has been her favorite – the scenery, the nature and a lot of time camping with friends and family outdoors captured her heart. She also enjoyed living near her fellow TempDev family in Colorado: Aaron Ramsey & Teri Armstrong.

But no matter where in the US her family roves, Sarah has found a second home at TempDev.

“Laura and all of the developers and PMs I work with are a family that makes you always feel like you belong. Everyone is always willing to help, work hard, and pull together to accomplish what needs to happen for our client's happiness.”

If you’re interested in getting to work with creative developers who can solve your most complex problems like Sarah Woods, contact TempDev here. See how they can improve your NextGen EHR & EPM experience today!