NextGen Healthcare Brand Guidelines: Quality Systems’ Product Name, Atlanta and Thoma Bravo

A dental software firm that took its product’s name.

NextGen Healthcare began as Quality Systems, Inc., a dental software company. English Wikipedia says Sheldon Razin formed it in 1973, working from his home study, and incorporated it in April 1974; the company’s website still carries a copyright line that runs from 1974. Quality Systems went public on Nasdaq in December 1982, under the ticker QSII.

The NextGen name arrived through acquisitions. Wikipedia says Clinitec was formed in 1994 by Pat Cline and Bryan Rosenberger to sell software for turning paper medical records into electronic ones. Quality Systems took a smaller stake in 1995 and bought the rest in 1996, then bought MicroMed, a maker of front- and back-office practice management software, in May 1997. The two businesses were combined in April 1999 as the MicroMed division, which was renamed the NextGen Healthcare Information Systems division in 2001. In 2009 the record system itself was renamed from NextGen EMR to NextGen EHR. Pat Cline left NextGen in 2011 and started a new health informatics business, Lightbeam Health Solutions, Wikipedia says.

In time the parent took the name of its product line. On 7 September 2018 Quality Systems, Inc. changed its name to NextGen Healthcare, Inc., and on 10 September its Nasdaq ticker changed from QSII to NXGN, according to Wikipedia.

Enterprise, Office and Mirth.

NextGen sells electronic health records, practice management software and revenue cycle services to ambulatory practices, partnering with medical, behavioral and oral health providers, its company description says. Its website divides the record into two products: NextGen Enterprise, for practices with ten or more providers, and NextGen Office, an integrated record and practice management system for smaller independent practices. Wikipedia notes that the Enterprise record and its practice management system share a single database.

Acquisitions shaped the range. In 2008 NextGen bought HSI of St. Louis, Missouri, and Practice Management Partners of Hunt Valley, Maryland, to expand its billing services and revenue cycle consulting, Wikipedia says. In 2013 Quality Systems bought Mirth Corporation, the developer of Mirth Connect, an open-source integration engine that Wikipedia says is used by thousands of healthcare organisations to exchange data; Mirth is still a family of interoperability products on NextGen’s website. In 2015 the company agreed to buy HealthFusion, a privately held San Diego developer of web-based software for physicians, hospitals and medical billing services. In 2019 it bought Topaz Information Solutions and Medfusion and agreed to buy OTTO Health, Wikipedia says.

For a time it also sold hospital software. Wikipedia records that Quality Systems bought the inpatient businesses Sphere Health Systems and Opus Healthcare Solutions in 2009 and 2010, and that its inpatient clinical and financial products went to QuadraMed in 2015.

When Thoma Bravo completed its purchase in 2023, the announcement said NextGen served more than 100,000 ambulatory healthcare providers, and it named products including NextGen Ambient Assist, an ambient listening tool that fills in the record, NextGen Mobile and NextGen Virtual Visits.

Records, practices and patients.

Health-record software is hard to photograph. The product is a database and a set of screens used by clinicians, so the companies that make it tend to show the people around the software instead: a nurse or doctor with a tablet at a bedside, a patient checking a phone, a team gathered around a monitor. Where the software itself appears, it is usually as a clean chart, schedule or dashboard screenshot with invented patient details.

The patient portal has become one of the most visible parts of these brands. Phone screens showing test results, appointment bookings and messages to a care team are now a standard image in the category, because the portal is often the only part of a hospital’s system that patients ever see under the software maker’s own name.

Headquarters matter too. Several of the larger companies built campuses in their home towns and use them in their storytelling, from themed office buildings in Wisconsin to office parks in Kansas City. Those campuses host training, customer visits and, in some cases, the companies’ own user-group meetings, such as Epic’s UGM, which its website lists among its events.

The rest of the category’s public face is shaped by conferences. Trade gatherings such as HIMSS and HLTH bring vendors, hospitals and investors together each year, and companies stage their own events alongside them, like the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit. Booths, keynote stages and product demonstrations at these events supply much of the imagery the industry uses to present itself. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it today and what it says about its own software.

A new base, a settlement and a take-private.

NextGen also changed its base. The Orange County Business Journal reported in March 2021 that the company had moved its headquarters from Irvine, California, to a smaller office in Atlanta that it had kept since 2014 as a leadership site, as part of plans to cut costs. At the time it had roughly 1,800 employees in the US, about 95% of whom had been working from home since the start of the pandemic, the company said, and it would keep a smaller footprint in Irvine, where about 300 of them were based. Thoma Bravo’s 2023 completion announcement gave the company’s dateline simply as a “remote-first company.”

In July 2023 NextGen settled False Claims Act and Anti-Kickback Statute allegations brought by the Department of Justice. HIT Consultant reported on 14 July 2023 that the government alleged that the company had obtained certification under the 2014 Edition criteria with the help of an auxiliary product built only to run the test scripts, and that it had given customers credits and event tickets to recommend its software. NextGen denied that any of its conduct violated the law, and the settlement included no admission of wrongdoing.

On 6 September 2023 the software investment firm Thoma Bravo announced an agreement to take NextGen private. Shareholders approved the deal on 7 November, and Thoma Bravo announced its completion on 10 November 2023; NextGen’s shares stopped trading and were delisted from Nasdaq. David Sides was then president and chief executive, and in the announcement he described the company’s vision as “Better Healthcare Outcomes for All,” a phrase that also closes its company description as “a quest to achieve better healthcare outcomes for all.” Thoma Bravo said it planned to add products and capabilities both through its own development and through acquisitions.

For a design guide, NextGen Healthcare shows a product name that outgrew its parent and became the company. Compare eClinicalWorks, another ambulatory record vendor, and Veradigm. For this guide we use a deep slate, a teal and a warm amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NextGen Healthcare’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.