Back in 2003, I was hired by an IPA (Independent Physicians Association) in Southern California to be their web developer.  At the time of my hiring, this IPA had recently purchased NextGen EMR and EMP and became a VAR – reseller and was going to implement the application in all the medical offices that they managed.  Because of my background experience in web development and programming I was also given the opportunity to also take on the role as a NextGen Developer for the group.  At first, I was able to just play with the system and try to figure it out on my own. Honestly, this was a great move -- I would spend hours studying the Master_Im template and the insane amount of triggers.  At first, it looked like a huge mess, but once I started to understand that each element on the template contains its own triggers for the most part, it started to make sense.  From that point, I would create test templates and try to figure out how to recreate specific functionality that already existed in the NextGen KBM templates.  This was a great opportunity because it also required me to learn how to reverse-engineer the template, and that was the greatest skill I learned at the time for template editing because it taught me how to quickly trouble-shoot templates and find problems.

NextGen has a good thing going here, giving their users the ability to fix, customize or create from scratch fully functioning EMR templates.  That alone, in my eyes, is one of NextGen’s greatest strengths and a reason I would highly recommend the NextGen system over its competitors.

The NextGen template editor is awesome. It can be used at a very basic level by office staff if simple items need to be fixed or changed, but at the same time it can be a tool to create very advanced EMR templates with the assistance of stored procedures.