How to Planning Your NextGen Version 5 8 Upgrade Guide

In addition to your regular upgrade planning steps, NextGen’s Version 5.8 application upgrade contains some new features that require additional thought – here we’ll review Advanced Audit and the NDC ID Lookup trigger and how these features can benefit you.

Advanced Audit As you may know, the Advanced Audit utility was introduced a little while ago but it was an optional feature. Beginning with 5.8, NextGen requires that Advanced Audit be installed, and it also satisfies Meaningful Use Stage 2 EP Core Measure 9. If you haven’t previously set up Advanced Audit, you’ll need to add this task into your upgrade plan. Be sure to allow yourself time to review the documentation and requirements, install it, set security rights, and test it. In addition to helping you meet the MU requirement, Advanced Audit can be very helpful when you have questions such as who deleted a medication or accessed a specific template.

NDC ID Lookup Trigger Version 5.8 introduces a new popup trigger, “NDC ID Lookup”, which makes it much easier to use the NDC Library, a feature that was introduced in 5.7. The NDC Library allows all NDCs to be maintained in File Maintenance, but in order for the NDC to be attached to the CPT code, the user previously (in 5.7) had to either manually attach the NDC in the Procedure Module or attach it in Charge Entry after the charge was submitted (or create template customizations in order to allow the NDC to be selected, attached to the CPT, and submitted directly from the templates). So if you’re upgrading from a pre-5.7 version or simply did not opt to use the NDC Library in 5.7, you’ll want to take a look at setting up and using this feature in 5.8. Modifying templates to include this new trigger saves your staff time and the extra steps of selecting the NDC from the NDC Library in either the Procedure Module or EPM Charge Entry. For example, you can use this new picklist trigger so that when your staff is documenting and billing for an injection on a template, they can launch a picklist of NDCs available in the library for that CPT code and select the code from the list, then simply click the “Submit to Superbill” button and send the CPT code with the NDC attached, into EPM to be pulled in and processed by billing staff.

To add this functionality to your templates, contact Incerio – your NextGen template experts.