Allergy & ENT Associates (AENT) is a fast-growing practice with 39 locations across Houston, Dallas, Fresno, and Austin. The group partners with 10+ hospitals and multiple ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), supporting more than 20 physicians in Houston alone. As the practice expanded rapidly across multiple regions, AENT sought to strengthen its ENT service line and manage increasingly complex surgical scheduling across its enterprise.

Problem

AENT’s rapid growth created major scheduling inefficiencies. Each week, staff manually tracked cases in Excel and cross-referenced orders between disparate systems, including NextGen EMR, paper records, and internal trackers. This process led to lost or delayed cases, limited insight into procedure trends, and high administrative burden for schedulers and physicians. The lack of transparency also slowed the capture of high-value procedures such as Inspire and self-pay cosmetic surgeries.

Solution

To address these challenges, AENT implemented iQueue for Surgical Clinics in a full rollout across all Houston facilities from day one. The platform integrated seamlessly with NextGen EMR, streamlining scheduling workflows and providing pipeline analytics to surface at-risk cases. Training was delivered by role—surgeons, schedulers, and clinical staff—while executive sponsorship ensured rapid adoption. With iQueue, AENT gained real-time case visibility across all facilities, automated key workflows such as clearance, prior authorization, and billing, and equipped surgeons with case builder tools that allowed them to enter procedures in seconds. In addition, robust analytics and reporting illuminated bottlenecks, highlighted volume trends, and flagged potential leaks in the scheduling pipeline. Together, these capabilities transformed AENT’s scheduling operations into a unified, transparent, and efficient process that drove measurable growth.

Following unification of NextGen EMR across its enterprise, AENT has already rolled out iQueue for Surgical Clinics in its Austin market and plans to expand next to Dallas and Fort Worth. The team is also leveraging pipeline analytics for physician outreach and developing improved case close-rate tracking.

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