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The proliferation of ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) among private medical practices — including plastic surgery specialists — has been steadily rising for years. The volume of outpatient surgeries performed in ASCs grew 32% over a 12-year span, according to a Bain & Company report. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the expansion of ASCs even further, and there are now estimated to be more than 11,000 ASCs across the U.S.

Concerned about ransomware attacks? You should be. With over 66 percent of healthcare organizations reporting they experienced a ransomware attack in 2021, proactively protecting your patients’ data has never been a higher priority.

For almost a decade, Nextech EHR has integrated with the IRIS® Registry. But what is the IRIS Registry and why does it matter?

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.

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).

Recent events have put a spotlight on a new element of payments security—terminals. For those readers who may not have been following the news, federal law enforcement (FBI) recently raided the Florida offices of PAX Technology, a leading, Chinese-based payment terminal provider. The raid was first reported by Krebs on Security. Based on the information we currently have, both the FBI and MI5 began investigating the firm after a major US payment processor started asking the vendor questions about network packets originating from PAX’s point-of-sale terminals. The vendor, it would appear, did not provide satisfactory answers which only increased suspicion and led the processor to report the situation to authorities.

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.

Well, folks… it’s that scary time of year once again. No, not Halloween. It may be October, but in this blog, we won’t be talking about ghouls and goblins. Nope. As you may already know, October is also Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And there are scarier things out there to worry about than those imaginary monsters in your closet.