Having a specialty-specific EHR is important. However, subspecialty features are sometimes left out of EHR designs. Glaucoma specialists have their own particular needs, and the best EHR should be designed to meet them. For example, it can sometimes be difficult for glaucoma specialists to analyze patient trends over time in order to determine how they are responding to treatment. Also, it can be inefficient when you have to navigate through multiple areas of a patient’s chart to document glaucoma-related data.

As the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in the United States, glaucoma remains a top concern across the ophthalmology community. Early disease identification, along with proper care management, is essential to limit ocular damage and preserve vision. It is critical for patients who have been or are at risk of getting glaucoma to regularly receive a comprehensive eye exam with dilation.

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).

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.

In a recent blog article, we examined how your payments solution could be costing your practice more than you realize. In one section of that article, we touched briefly on the costs associated with point of sale (POS) hardware. And cost certainly remains an important factor. These terminals are not cheap, after all, and are commonly priced anywhere from $150 to $1000 dollars. However, when it comes to payment terminals, there is more at stake than simply just the up-front costs of purchasing the hardware.

Whether called electronic medical records (EMR) or electronic health records (EHR), the basic idea is the same: Patient records are stored, maintained, and updated electronically. The underlying analytics and informatics components are nearly universal, but the input and output can be drastically different from one system to another, creating either challenges or opportunities.

While obviously providing exceptional patient care is an important goal for your practice, you are also trying to run a successful business. To accomplish this, your practice needs to be able to do what all successful businesses do—MAKE MONEY. These days, the ability to efficiently bring in revenue means having a digital payments solution. Unfortunately, when it comes to certain payment processing solutions, many practices are not getting much when you consider what they are paying.

Fraud is one of those topics that no one really enjoys talking about. It can be uncomfortable to think that someone in your practice, even someone you are close to and believe you have a strong relationship with, would steal from you. But it happens. And you need to be aware of it because fraud and theft are far more common in healthcare practices than you might expect.