On December 9th, 2021, a critical vulnerability was discovered in a popular code library, Log4J, that affected many applications across the world. It affected everything from firewalls to security software. Essentially, anything that uses this library and takes user input is potentially vulnerable. Researchers have named this vulnerability Log4Shell.

Back in November, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the 2022 Final Physician Fee Schedule that outlines Quality Payment Program (QPP)/Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) changes for next year. This blog will provide you with a high-level summary of changes to help you understand how to plan your quality improvement process for next year.

Do you know what time it is? It’s turkey time, people! (Apologies to the vegetarians out there). But yes, Thanksgiving is upon us once again. As per tradition, this is the time of year when we consider the things for which we are most thankful (and spend a whole day eating ourselves into food comas and then the brave or mad among us choose to go out the next day for an annual shopping event with its own casualty rate). And this Thanksgiving there are certainly a lot of things to be thankful for—we aren’t locked up in our houses like we were last year, COVID vaccines are widely available, new episodes of Dexter are back on Showtime, and it looks like we will be able to openly travel this holiday season (and on that note, if you do travel, please be kind to airline personnel).

In the last week of October 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a number of new actions intended to strengthen communication regarding breast implants. Additionally, these new measures are meant to help patients who are considering undergoing breast implant procedures in making informed decisions while also improving patient safety.

While a great deal of information has been released on how electronic health records (EHR) will be affected by the Cures Act regulations, there seems to be far less understanding about how the new requirements will affect practices. In this blog article, we will clarify how some of the new requirements will apply to your practice, even if you are not a MIPS participant, as well as how transitioning to the cloud from a server-based system will make complying with these regulations easier for your practice next year and into the future.

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.

The rise of social media has moved a lot of human interaction online, allowing us to reach each other without having ever met. For Ophthalmology practices, this means referrals are no longer something that come mostly from other ophthalmologists/physicians, as they traditionally have in the past. The truth is the vast majority of Ophthalmology practices are already aware that they need to be using social media and are currently using it. The question is whether or not they are using it properly.

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.