We’d like to apologize for an advertisement that ran in the print April issue of Glaucoma Today. This advertisement erroneously claimed that we were rated the #1 EMR for Glaucoma Specialists by Black Book in 2016. As clarification, Black Book does not have a category for Glaucoma Specialists and the 2016 Ambulatory EMR rankings have not yet been announced. What this advertisement should have stated is that Nextech was rated the #1 Ophthalmology Vendor in Black Book’s 2015 Ophthalmology Survey.

This has been a crazy month for ransomware attacks and, unfortunately, the vast majority of them have been focused on healthcare facilities and providers. In fact, no less than five healthcare organizations have been hit in just the last 30 days (and those are just the ones we know about because they were actually reported). On March 30, King’s Daughters Health in Madison, Ind. had to shut down their EMR after finding a user file infected with a well-known form of ransomware dubbed “Locky.” Then, on April 4, operations at MedStar Health were brought to a screeching halt by a ransomware attack that locked their EMR and demanded a payment of roughly $19,000 worth of Bitcoin to release the data. MedStar chose not to pay the ransom, instead taking the time to restore their system via backups. However, I would bet dollars to donuts that doing so ended up costing them far more than $19,000 when all was said and done.

In a study conducted by REACH Health, nearly 400 healthcare executives, physicians, nurses and other professionals gave their feedback regarding the impact of telemedicine in their own practices. The REACH Health 2016 U.S. Telemedicine Industry Benchmark Survey found that 62 percent of practices currently utilizing telemedicine believed it was highly successful in improving patient convenience. An additional 36 percent regarded it as "moderately successful."

Advancements in healthcare technology have fostered an environment more encouraging for greater patient engagement between patients and providers.

Settled into ICD-10 yet? The infamous transition to the new coding system last October was met with a significant amount of controversy, but now almost six months out, it appears it wasn't as rocky as many believed, despite the 155,000 total ICD-10 codes.

In an effort to provide relief for both eligible medical professionals and eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has once again extended the deadline to file for a hardship exception for Meaningful Use. The deadline now sits at July 1, 2016. This is the second time in the last month that CMS has opted to push back the hardship exception deadline. Originally, the deadline was March 15 for eligible professionals.

Before venturing out to attend the 2016 Nextech EDGE conference last week, I decided to write a bit of a teaser blog article on a topic I was covering at my session on cybersecurity—Social Engineering. (Side note: I would like to extend a most sincere thank you to everyone at EDGE who attended my sessions). In order to avoid publishing any spoilers, however, I chose not to go into too much detail and promised to elaborate further once I returned from the conference. Well… I have returned, so it is time for me to make good on that promise. Since we already explained what social engineering is in the previous article, I don’t think it’s necessary to rehash all the basics. Instead, let’s start by taking a look at some examples of social engineering tactics that are commonly employed by hackers and cybercriminals.

When we set out to create EDGE - Nextech's National User Conference - we envisioned an environment where clients could unite as one Nextech community, educating, discovering, generating and exchanging with industry colleagues. EDGE 2016 accomplished just that - in record numbers, too.