Want to Drive Patient Satisfaction and Capture More Market Share for Your Physicians? Make It Easy for Patients to Self-Schedule Virtual Visits

June 18, 2021

jane-brubaker// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

Even as healthcare organizations build out their marketing stacks to better reach, engage, and serve patients and prospective patients, health technology companies are building stacks of their own, for some of the same reasons — to help their clients improve patient access and convenience.

NextGen Healthcare was named by KLAS in 2021 as the top practice management solution and the number one ambulatory EMR for practices with 11 to 75 providers. Through strategic acquisitions, the company has been assembling the components of an integrated technology platform built around its core electronic medical record. On the practice management side, NextGen Health offers a full range of services, including revenue cycle management, billing and payments, electronic data interchange (EDI), healthcare data analytics, and clinical documentation.

Recent acquisitions focus on patient experience. During the company’s Q2 2021 earnings call, CEO Rusty Frantz said, “The way providers engage with patients must change and must evolve. Unless providers go to a platform approach with integration, they are not going to have the patient experience that they truly need. Providers are realizing that they just moved into ‘consumer land.'”

Grant Lunney

Grant Lunney, vice president of patient experience solutions, NextGen Healthcare

NextGen Healthcare made a significant move into “consumer land” itself through the acquisition of virtual visits provider Otto Health in December 2019, following a partnership between the two companies announced in October 2018. “The biggest focus area for us was to take NextGen virtual visits from a workflow-centric application to something that was very scalable and sustainable,” says Grant Lunney, vice president of patient experience solutions at NextGen Healthcare, and former strategy officer and vice president of product for Otto.

That was before COVID-19. Little did anyone know just how scalable the solution would have to be, with the pandemic looming just over the horizon in early 2020.


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