In January, Nextech acquired plastic surgery EMR and office management provider SupraMed, further cementing the company’s commitment to delivering top-tier specialty-specific EMR and practice management solutions. We caught up with Dr. Robert Pollack, SupraMed founder and board certified plastic surgeon, to tell us more about what the acquisition means to the plastic surgery market.

Every year, Black Book Market Research releases 2015 healthcare industry surveys across multiple specialties, ranking the top electronic health record vendors in each specialty. We’re thrilled to announce that Nextech was ranked as the No. 1 Plastic Surgery EMR vendor in Black Book’s 2015 Plastic Surgery Survey! This newest accolade adds to what has already been a very exciting year for Nextech as we’ve introduced new tools, solutions and improvements since January. Our recognition as the top Plastic Surgery vendor further proves our position as the market leader in Plastic Surgery software.

Unless some kind of unexpected zero hour delay occurs between now and the October 1 deadline, ICD-10 is coming to a Plastic Surgery practice near you (in fact, it’s coming to your Plastic Surgery practice). It’s the Final Countdown, people! Somebody cue me up a 1980s-style “get ready” montage!

The United States is currently the only developed country in the world that is still using the outdated ICD-9-CM Volume III for diagnosis codes, electronic health records, and insurance claims. However, this is soon to change.  As of October 1st 2015, the official final deadline for ICD-10 implementation, insurance companies will no longer be accepting ICD-9 for diagnosis or procedure codes.  This means that all healthcare professionals must begin learning ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS codes now, especially as they apply to medical specialties. In this three-part series, we have been examining ten of the most commonly used ICD-9-CM codes for each of three distinct specialties—Dermatology, Ophthalmology, and Plastic Surgery—and comparing them to their respective ICD-10-CM counterparts.  This demonstrates how the high specificity level of ICD-10-CM makes it far superior to ICD-9-CM (which is loaded with obsolete, outdated terminology as well as outmoded and ambiguous codes, not to mention inadequate data that fails to accommodate for a multitude of medical discoveries and advances that have occurred in recent decades).