First-90-Day Playbook: Accelerating Your NextGen Workflow Redesign

NextGen EHR workflow redesign and optimization is essential for healthcare practices looking to improve patient care while protecting profits. Redesigning how your practice captures patient data, retrieves records, documents appointments, and liaises with insurers can dramatically improve your revenue cycle management and enhance patient care.

The first three months of your NextGen Workflow redesign could be the most critical. Let’s take a look.

Why a 90-Day Plan Matters for NextGen Workflow Optimization

There are numerous bottlenecks slowing the provision of care and the collection of payments. Data siloes in legacy systems, the lack of digitalization of paper records, and poor interoperability all impact the duration of treatment timelines. When practices take longer to treat patients, it takes longer to get paid.

But EHR optimization isn’t truly effective unless you plan carefully. The first 90 days are the most important for engaging stakeholders, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks, and integrating workflows across your key systems.

Weeks 1–2: Assessment & Goal Setting

Start by understanding where you are and where you want to be.

Assemble Your NextGen Workflow Redesign Stakeholder Task Force

Gain insights from members of your finance team, your front desk personnel, and clinicians. They’ll all have important input into what existing bottlenecks are causing the worst problems.

Baseline KPIs & Revenue Cycle Benchmarks

When it comes to revenue cycle KPI benchmarks, healthcare practices need to prioritize exactly what to monitor, measure, and report. Of course, you can only measure improvement when you know where you are now. Take baseline KPIs and document them carefully so you can measure improvements throughout the optimization period.

Inventory Current Workflows & Customizations

Document all existing workflows and any current customizations.

Weeks 3–4: Quick Wins and Workflow Mapping

Identifying two to three quick wins can help engage personnel with the system changes and highlight the potential ROI of workflow optimization.

Eliminating NextGen Workflow Bottlenecks

Highlight processes holding your practice back. These may be at the patient care level, in the front office, or in the backend processes. Design templates or workflows to eliminate these bottlenecks.

EHR Data Conversion Checklist and Best Practices

Use this checklist as a guide for EHR data conversion:

1. List any systems currently holding patient data

2. Determine whether these systems will retire or remain in use

3. Assess whether legacy systems are compatible with NextGen services, i.e., is data conversion necessary

4. Work with IT teams to decide which data can be mapped directly into NextGen tools

5. Ensure paper-based records are included in any migration

6. Where data cannot be digitally mapped or transferred to newer systems, implement manual transfer processes

7. Ensure new workflows have fields for all existing patient data

Customizing templates and workflows to your specialty will make data more accessible in the future.

Enhancing Patient Portal & Telehealth Integration

NextGen patient portal customization helps you tailor your online offerings to your specific patient types. If you run a women’s health clinic, for example, your patient portal may have fields for specific details on uterine health and obstetric scans. Cutting out irrelevant data improves the patient experience and encourages users to stay in touch.

You should also work to integrate your telehealth workflows into your NextGen EHR systems, wherever possible. Logging telehealth interactions and making it easy to collect and retrieve data can significantly streamline patient journeys and reduce clinicians' administrative time.

Remember, the new 2025 telehealth billing guidelines have changed how often you can contact critical care patients and added new billing codes for family psychotherapy, obesity counseling, and several other services. Ensuring these codes are included in your workflows where appropriate can cut your admin time and make billing easier.

Weeks 5–8: NextGen Workflow Redesign and Technology Leverage

In month two, you can start building workflows specific to your clinic and specialty.

NextGen Template and Report Customization

Develop templates that include fields for all necessary data and reduce the need to record data you don’t require. This will reduce administrative burden and the risk of clinician burnout.

MIPS Quality Reporting Steps

For MIPS quality reporting, NextGen offers various tools that help practice managers understand how they’re performing in these three areas:

• Improvement activities

• Promoting interoperability

• Quality

You can find out your previous year’s MIPS scores from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) online portal. Setting up accurate reporting workflows for MIPS is essential to ensure the correct adjustments are made to Medicare payments.

BI Dashboards: Power BI and SQL Reporting Setups

Using tools like Tableau and Power BI for healthcare dashboards helps you visualize data more effectively. SQL reports for NextGen EHR systems are essential to ensure accuracy, as they rely on a practice's raw data. Using SQL queries also allows you to schedule reports and manage data access from a single system.

Weeks 9–12: Training, Go-Live, Continuous Improvement

Now it’s time to move your redesigned workflows into a live environment.

Staff Training and Change Management

Ensure all personnel receive relevant training and, where appropriate, delegate a change manager. Focus on the benefits of the new systems to better engage team members with the new workflows.

Final Go-Live and Immediate Support Plan

Monitor throughout the launch for issues and glitches. Have clear channels of communication for support and to report any problems.

You should also monitor and measure your results for continuous optimization.

FAQs: Accelerating NextGen Workflow Success

Why does NextGen EHR workflow optimization matter?

Optimizing your practice’s NextGen workflows can improve productivity, reduce burnout, and improve patient outcomes.

Do I need to hire technical teams to optimize NextGen workflows?

Not necessarily. If your internal IT teams need support, consider working with an expert partner to tweak workflows and customize templates as needed. This can be more cost-effective than hiring full-time staff.

What’s so important about the first 90 days?

Having a 90-day roadmap for NextGen EHR workflow optimization allows you to closely monitor progress, compare metrics, and ensure all your personnel are engaged in your workflow redesign. It also ensures you see meaningful, positive changes after only three months.

Partnering With NextGen Experts: Why TempDev?

TempDev is an experienced team of NextGen consultants. We work with practices just like yours to improve EHR workflows, customize templates, and streamline processes and reporting. Our goal is to help you improve the quality of patient care without sacrificing your bottom line.

TempDev can also help you implement NextGen EPM best practices to promote better revenue cycle management and protect your practice’s profits. Contact TempDev online or call us at 1.888.TEMPDEV to discuss your NextGen EHR workflow optimization roadmap.