Meet IT Director Nancy Villa
Learn how an IT director guided a multisite OBGYN practice to adopt a user-friendly EHR system
The ModMed® Practice HERO Award recognizes leaders in operations who harness our solutions to help improve their practice. Award finalist Nancy Villa’s IT and management skills helped her providers and staff switch from a server-based platform to the all-in-one cloud-based solution from ModMed. Discover how she did it below.
Nancy’s story
I’ve worked over 30 years in IT and the last 17 in healthcare IT at Northeast OB/GYN Associates in Texas. I have a master’s degree in health informatics. In addition to traditional IT services, I’ve been responsible for transitioning our practice from paper charts to our previous server-based platform and finally to ModMed. We spent a couple of years looking at different systems. The providers wanted to move away from hosting our servers and paying to upgrade them. They wanted a web-based system allowing easy access to patient charts, so I started researching our options.
In February 2024, we added ModMed’s EMA® EHR and Practice Management system to boost our efficiency. Additionally, we implemented Patient Collaboration tools with Klara® to improve our communication with patients throughout our five clinical sites in San Antonio and the surrounding area. Initially, we looked at various software vendors. I heard about ModMed’s specialty-specific EHR, EMA. It made everything more integrated, and our 24 providers and staff agreed.
I was shocked when I found out I was nominated for the HERO Award.
“A huge time-saver”
The providers are documenting patient visits faster with ModMed. Documentation with Protocols and just the overall ease of use of EMA has really sped up their documentation time. That’s been a huge time-saver, and it also helps make billing more complete.
We have the imaging module for ultrasound images that go directly into the patient’s chart. That’s been a nice feature, allowing our providers to easily access those images in EMA. Before, we would have to save an image and go outside our EHR to view it. Now, if the providers forget any details, they can always go back to the images and recreate the documentation. So the ModMed system is closing the loop between patient care and billing more seamlessly.
Scheduling made easier
Klara has absolutely been great throughout our entire practice. Since implementing Klara, we have doubled the number of patients scheduled compared to our previous software. It used to be that on busy days like Mondays, the phones would ring off the hook. Now, more patients are scheduling through Klara which has lowered our call volume and freed up staff’s time.
Our reminders go with instructions on where to click to schedule an appointment. Klara has really helped us keep our patient volume up, especially when we’re short-staffed in our scheduling department. Also, instead of triage staff answering questions over the phone, a lot of questions can be answered through Klara, which saves staff time. This not only improves the speed of triage responses but the phone calls we do receive, we can respond faster. In addition, our surgery patients’ scheduling paperwork is now digitized and sent to the patient using Klara. It’s really helped us be more efficient.
Boosting patient communication
Our communication with the patient is stronger now. If a doctor is running behind, the medical assistant can use Klara to quickly send out a communication stating, “Your doctor is running late — or we need to quickly reschedule you to a later time because he or she is delivering a baby.”
We reach them through their portal when it’s time to schedule an appointment and ask them to complete medical history and other forms at the same time. The patient engagement tools were a big reason for selecting ModMed. Our previous portal was weak, and we received complaints from patients about it. Our engagement tools at the time were an add-on with a different vendor and they weren’t integrated into our system. Our patients like everything digitized. They like to schedule, fill out forms and check in online. If they don’t have to talk to somebody, they’d rather not.
Advice for other IT Directors
You really have to know the staff workflow and their pain points well to say one system will work better than another. We also shared demos with physician and staff champions first, so they could explain the advantages of switching to the others. Having staff be open to change was probably one of the biggest struggles. I went to each clinic and held “lunch and learns” to show them how ModMed worked. People don’t usually like change, but it was amazing to see our staff embrace the tools when they realized how much time they were saving. Once they saw how easy ModMed was to use, they were fully onboard.
Learn more about our ModMed HEROs.
The statements and conclusions contained herein reflect the opinions of Nancy Villa and not those of ModMed. ModMed makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy of any such information. Results may vary depending on medical practice size, product usage and other variables.
