Here at Nextech, we are so excited to be back in person for EDGE 2022. In fact, general registration has begun and will remain open until the very last day of 2021. This means there is still plenty of time for you to convince your boss that going to EDGE is best idea ever and that you should totally be going.

Welcome back to the blog, ghouls and goblins! It’s almost Halloween once again, that time of year when we celebrate all things scary. Perhaps one of the scariest things going on right now is the fact that many specialty practices still believe that having an onsite server infrastructure is somehow faster and more secure than using cloud-based solutions. It’s not. In fact, it’s terrifying to think about how on-premise systems are still out there giving nightmares to specialty practices like a burn-scarred maniac with a bladed glove.

A year and a half ago, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world like a ton of bricks and caused a lot of people to do some pretty weird stuff. For example, people bought up all the soap and hand sanitizer they could find (okay, that one at least made some sense, considering the situation). And then there was that whole toilet paper panic buying thing (which did not make sense).

Well, folks… it’s that scary time of year once again. No, not Halloween. It may be October, but in this blog, we won’t be talking about ghouls and goblins. Nope. As you may already know, October is also Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And there are scarier things out there to worry about than those imaginary monsters in your closet.

EDGE has become an annual Nextech tradition over the last eight years, one that our staff and clients look forward to. With the onset of COVID and the resulting pandemic in early 2020, of course, our last EDGE event had to be moved to a fully virtual environment. While the online format of EDGE 2021 was a success, many attendees missed the fun and camaraderie they remembered from EDGEs in the past.

Roughly a year and a half ago, the sudden spread of COVID-19 quickly turned telehealth solutions into necessary tools for specialty practice as they struggled to continue providing care when lockdowns and forced closures were put in place. While the widespread use of connected care was already on the horizon, there is no doubt that the current levels of telehealth adoption were heavily accelerated by the pandemic. This began when a large number of states enacted temporary waivers of preexisting HIPAA rules and other regulations to allow for faster and easier use of telehealth solutions during the public health emergency.

The COVID-19 pandemic definitely shined a spotlight on the topic of burnout, especially among providers and staff working in hospitals or first-responder environments. Now, as the pandemic winds down, these healthcare workers are finally starting to experience a bit of relief. However, for providers in specialty practices, the opposite is occurring. Workloads for specialty practices are actually ramping up now, as patients feel safe enough to return for elective procedures that were delayed during the pandemic. Sadly, specialty providers have already been ranked among the top sufferers of burnout for over five years now. This is why it is so important for specialty practices to address burnout now, to avoid allowing this new surge to damage productivity.

As the pandemic winds down and cases of COVID-19 continue dropping in the United States, new rounds of regulatory changes should be expected as part of the return to normalcy. Among the most recent are new OSHA guidelines for healthcare workers per the U.S. Labor Department. In this blog, we will examine some of the main points of this new guidance.