Take my advice… Stay within the NextGen KBM.  Keep the customizations small, repeatable, and within the KBM standard as set forth by NextGen Healthcare.  Here’s the first, most simple reason why…

You are paying for NextGen Development with your software maintenance dollars.  They will…

• Track and Fix Bugs
• Provide Product Support (even on weekends)
• Research, Review and Develop KBM Updates Based on Market Conditions
• New Content Development

We’ve worked with many clients that have fully customized KBM environments only to update custom template code to keep up the newer features and reporting  in the KBM.  Now with meaningful use(MU), ICD10, 5010, HQM, etc these practices are  spending extra resources to update their templates to capture the necessary data.  Reporting for the new regulatory changes is also more difficult with customized KBM content.

In our next post we will discuss Why Your Custom NextGen Templates Suck! in regards to billing and reporting.

Stay Tuned…

Have you ever had a document summary macro that you wished would not wrap at odd places (original NextGen high edit documents, not Tx Text)?  You can force information to be printed on different lines when you create the document text field in a template and you embed the format statement wherever you wish to have the new line occur.

Example:

Trigger 1:

Assign field value

{FORMAT({0}{n}{1},{template_.txt_concatenation} , “Procedure:”+” “+{template_.txt_biopsy})}

Trigger 2:

Assign field value

template_.txt_concatenation = {template_.txt_concatenation} +” “ + “Lesion size:” + {template_.txt_diameter} +” “ + “cm”

Trigger 3:

Assign field value

{FORMAT({0}{n}{1},{template_.txt_concatenation} , “Indication for procedure today:”+” “+{template_.indication})}

Trigger 4:

Assign field value

{FORMAT({0}{n}{1},{template_.txt_concatenation} , “Local anesthesia:”+” “+{template_.anesthesia} + “ “ + {template_.amount} + “ “ + “cc”)}

The document summary macro will print like this:

Procedure: Biopsy  Lesion size: .5 cm

Indication for procedure today: painful

Local anesthesia: Lidocaine 5 cc

and not like this:

Procedure: Biopsy  Lesion size: .5 cm  Indication for procedure today: painful Local anesthesia: Lidocaine 5 cc

In our experience our clients love the new readability.  Has anyone had similar experiences with summary macros?  Next week we will talk about the NextGen Healthcare KBM upgrade process and why we think it’s very important to stay on the KBM path.

Have you ever had a template with a note field and you don’t want all of the information to just run together in one continuous stream of words?  Did you know that you can force a new line in the note field?  With the following command you can force a new line so that the presented information is spaced for readability.

{ FORMAT ({0}{n}{1},fieldname, value)}

•  “fieldname” is the name of the field you wish to add a CR/LF before adding informat
•  “value” is what you want to appear on a different line from what is already in fieldname.

We know your physicians and staff will appreciate this.

Take a look and see how you can do this in the NextGen Template Editor:

123,921 Eligible Professionals have registered for EHR Incentives, 15,255 have successfully attested to meaningful use in the Medicare program.
This seems like such a HUGE difference in numbers. That’s just over 12% of Eligible Professionals that registered attested to meaningful use. Does this mean that we’re going to see a tidal wave of meaningful use attestation in 2012? Possibly.

I believe that we’ll see more eligible professionals attesting to meaningful use in 2012. However, the question is how many of those other 108,666 will attest to meaningful use in 2012 and how many are like the Happy EMR Doctor who just registered to see the MU process. I wonder how many first hand meaningful use experiences by doctors will scare doctors away from MU attestation.

3.077 Eligible Hospitals have registered EHR Incentives and 604 of those have successfully attested to meaningful use.
This is almost 20% of hospitals that have registered that have attested to meaningful use. It’s not surprising that this number is a lot higher than eligible professionals. I still believe that the wave of meaningful use attestation will come from these other 2473 hospitals and probably many more that still haven’t registered. I haven’t seen a good number of how many hospitals are in the US. Does anyone know that number? The EHR incentive money that goes to hospitals will dwarf those of eligible professionals.

$2,533,689,145 has been paid out in Medicare and Medicaid Incentives.
$2.5 billion sent out in 2011. I just went back to the first time I tagged meaningful use on this site on April 3, 2009 (coincidentally I have 19 pages of 10 posts each tagged with Meaningful Use). Amazing to think that it’s taken basically 3 years to spend $2.5 billion on EHR.

277 hospitals have received payments under both Medicare and Medicaid and of those 12 were CAHs.
That’s about half of the hospitals that have attested to meaningful use under Medicare are also getting the Medicaid EHR incentive money as well.

22% of eligible professionals that have been paid EHR incentives are Family Practitioners and 20% are Internal Medicine.
I must admit that I would have thought that the percentage of family doctors that got paid EHR incentive money would have been a lot higher. I guess when you have so many other specialty areas I shouldn’t be that surprised. I also wonder why the internal medicine number is so high. These numbers actually make me believe that a lot of family practice doctors are sitting out when it comes to meaningful use.

41 States Medicaid programs were open for registration. Two additional States launched in January of 2012.
I wonder what’s holding back the other 7 states. From what I’ve seen all the states will eventually get there.

More than 1500 EHR products have been certified by ONC-ATCBs.
That’s a lot of EHR software. I still put the EHR company list at about 300 EHR vendors. 1500 includes multiple versions of the same software, partial EHR certification for products like data warehouses, ePrescribing, etc. The best thing that’s come from the ONC-ATCB program is that it has made EHR certification basically irrelevant in the EHR selection process. Every EHR vendor is certified now. This is much better than the false assurances that EHR certification provided before. I still dislike what EHR certification has done to the industry, but at least it’s not misleading doctors the same way it was before.

 reprinted with permission from www.emrandhipaa.com