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.

CMS released the Quality Payment Program Year 3 Final Rule on November 1st. The rule included the removal of 26 Quality Measures, the addition of 10 new Quality measures, and significant changes to the Promoting Interoperability category of the program. Nextech will be releasing more information on these changes in the near future, including a video outlining the changes with tips to prepare for the coming year. Until then, here are a few steps to get you started.

Never has there been a more dynamic time in healthcare, and the pace of change is extraordinary. Emerging payment models are encouraging more proactive care, demanding greater collaboration and rewarding value. In addition, rising consumerism is pushing for more service-oriented patient experiences. Given these evolving—and sometimes contradictory—dynamics, ophthalmology, dermatology and plastic surgery providers should be continuously reexamining their processes for care delivery and operations to be sure they’re keeping up.