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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.

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).

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.

Performing a regular Security Risk Assessment (SRA) will help an organization ensure it is compliant with HIPAA’s administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. A risk assessment also helps practices discover areas where protected health information (PHI) could be at risk. To learn more about the assessment process and how it can benefit your organization, we recommend visiting the Office for Civil Rights' official guidance.

Here we are. Talking about ransomware. Again. And the truth is, whether we are tired of talking about it or not, the current ransomware situation (especially for those in healthcare) is only getting worse as this year goes on. Simply put—things are bad. How bad? Well… bad enough for the FBI director to compare the current nationwide surge in ransomware attacks in the U.S. to the September 11th attacks of 2001. You have to admit, that’s a pretty extreme comparison. However, it’s not too far off. As we’ve seen already with the recent Colonial Pipeline attack, ransomware has the potential to bring parts of our country’s infrastructure to a grinding halt and disrupt commerce, similar to the results of a physical terrorist attack.