You did it! You went to a conference and made it back with, hopefully, a new wealth of knowledge and a bag full of business cards and notes. But now what? If you attended all of the amazing sessions, talked with experts and networked with exhibitors you are sure to be a little overwhelmed. But don’t set that (brand new EDGE) bag in the corner of your office and “look at everything later." Take it out and assess!

Remember learning how to ride a bike? Although it was slightly nerve-wracking when your parents took the training wheels off, it was also empowering. You had moved beyond just getting the hang of things and were really making progress. You could travel past the end of the block and explore new possibilities. In some ways, this is similar to what healthcare organizations are going through with the 2019 Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) Rules.

With Valentine’s Day approaching, people are starting to celebrate love and friendship. However, given the competing priorities your front office staff deals with each day, they may have trouble putting their hearts into any festivities.

The coming festivities will bring a thrill of excitement for many people as they prepare to ring in 2019. For healthcare providers, this time of year can also present some unusual patient care situations, which could lead to a little atypical ICD-10 coding. Here is a brief look at several codes that might be getting increased attention in the next few weeks.

Attending conferences every year can be overwhelming, exhausting and maybe even nerve-wrecking; but they don’t have to be! Nextech’s 5th Annual User Conference, EDGE, is right around the corner and we want to provide you with helpful tips to ensure you are fully optimizing your conference experience.

This is a guest post by Tuesday Wilson from MyMedLeads. Over the course of the last decade, many physicians have developed a love-hate relationship with online reviews. On one hand, review sites like Yelp and Google have emerged as a great way for practices to be discovered by local consumers searching for their services. On the other hand, negative reviews can be a source of great anxiety and frustration for doctors. Whether you love them or hate them, the fact is online reviews influence prospective patients and have a very real impact on your business.

As the healthcare industry moves forward with the shift into value-based care, there is a lot of discussion, frustration and confusion within the community around how this change will improve the current and future state of healthcare. These shifts and regulation changes are creating many pain points for healthcare organizations across the country. However, as we enter into the holiday season, we’d like to pause and think about areas of advancement for which we should be grateful. We live in an era of unprecedented access and discovery for medicine, and we sometimes lose sight of the amazing things we have achieved. Each one of the following trends is moving the needle toward more quality-driven, patient-focused care. Taken together, they stand to transform the industry in ways that have yet to be fully imagined.

The term “cloud” gets tossed around a lot these days as software providers talk about their “cloud-based” offerings and their technology that “sits on the web.” However, there are some common misconceptions surrounding this concept that warrant clarification. As specialty providers look to upgrade their technology solutions, they should make sure they fully appreciate what it means to be in the cloud and how that can impact their functionality, efficiency and performance.