NextPatient customer spotlight: The Eye Institute of Utah

• 7 providers
• NextPatient solutions: Patient Self-Scheduling, Smart Reminders, Broadcast & Two-Way Texting, Post-Visit Reviews

A NextPatient client since 2022, The Eye Institute of Utah benefits from a seamless EHR integration with Nextech, intuitive self-scheduling, and efficient patient communication tools, and continues to adopt new features. Lexi Guild, Director of Clinical Operations, shares how NextPatient helps the practice deliver a modern patient experience, supported by a user-friendly interface, self-service capabilities, and a “totally tenacious” client success team.

Results

• 41% of appointments self-scheduled online are booked after hours
• 3% no-show rate
• 4.9 Google rating with 2,500+ reviews

What challenges led you to seek out NextPatient?

As a business, we were facing challenges with different patient engagement systems, and really, it boiled down to integration with our EHR because our staff had to log in to multiple platforms.

We also had challenges with patient communication. With our last platform, we had to manually enter each patient's information to send text messages or emails. It was a time-consuming process, especially in situations like power outages or severe weather where we need to send mass communication. NextPatient has made communicating with our patients much more streamlined.

What made you choose NextPatient over other solutions?

NextPatient is easy to use. It's not hard to find the information that you're looking for, and it's a huge value to be able to make changes ourselves.

We recently added a new type of visit to our online scheduling, and it took less than 10 minutes to set it up, make the changes live, and for patients to start scheduling. That’s not something we could do prior to NextPatient.

The demos are an accurate representation of the product, and we've been happy with it.

What stood out to you about the implementation process?

The implementation felt really seamless because of NextPatient’s integration with Nextech. Plus, all of the vendor support. The people that we worked with throughout the process were extremely responsive and could jump on a call, answer questions, and point us in the right direction — and that continues to be true even after being with NextPatient for some time. Occasionally, we'll run into a nuance that we're not quite sure how to manage ourselves, but we can have someone on the phone the same day typically to get things resolved.

What specific features have been most valuable to your practice?

NextPatient’s highest value capability has been online scheduling, especially for our refractive patients. Being able to add providers, remove providers, add times that match our templates, and have those changes reflected immediately on our website has been amazing. 

Also, text communication. In today's world, people don't like to talk on the phone very much, so having the ability to text with patients securely is huge. Many of our team members use two-way texting to communicate with patients about rescheduling. 

Our facility also participates in a high volume of clinical research, and so it's nice for us to send broadcast messages through NextPatient as well to recruit patients for a new study who have communicated interest in the past.

Have there been any unexpected benefits?

Our team has been surprised by how user-friendly NextPatient is. With other platforms, we’ve been told, “Oh, it’s easy. You won’t have any problems,” and then the first time you log in when you don't have a support person with you, it's like learning everything over again.

NextPatient’s system is really intuitive. It's not overwhelming in terms of buttons and pages, so it’s easy to find what you need, especially for a user that's not logging in every single day. That can be a challenge — trying to relearn how to use the system if you only log in once a month — but our team has communicated that they don't have issues with NextPatient.

What advice would you give to other practice leaders considering a similar solution?

If you're evaluating solutions, I would say the number one thing is an integration with your EHR, not only for the scheduling of patient appointments but also for real-time reporting. For example, we frequently look at the report for cancellations. Not only are we able to see the patients who have canceled, but we can also see if patients rescheduled, which gives us an up-to-date heartbeat on the flow of patients in and out of the practice. It really helps minimize the risk of patients falling through the cracks.

Was there a specific moment the value of NextPatient became clear to you?

The value comes from the day-to-day benefits that we gain from NextPatient. For us, there wasn't really an aha moment — our sales representative did a good job of setting our expectations. 

Because everything with NextPatient has been so easy to implement, we’re excited to launch more features, like text-to-pay and the online patient demographic and insurance verification processes.

Is there anything else you'd like to share about your experience?

What I have noticed that is really different than other vendors — not even just in this domain, just in general with other outside relationships we have — is that if your account manager doesn't have an answer, they are just totally tenacious at finding the people within the NextPatient team that do have the information, and then swiftly schedule calls to get us what we need. Even though the account managers may not be superusers of our EHR, they know who is an expert and can help facilitate finding a resolution, so it never becomes a long, drawn-out headache.