There’s no doubting the growing importance of customer reviews - and healthcare practices and medical providers are not exempt from the trend. This trend is gaining speed partly thanks to the massive use of smartphones, tablets and laptops that enable patients to chime in with their thoughts about doctors and their impression of the rest of the staff and their overall experience.

A patient portal is not the door that people walk through to get inside your medical practice. It is the term given to the electronic portal that you can enable for them thanks to your electronic health record software. Essentially, it is a way for patients to log into their account to check on details of their healthcare and to ask questions of the staff, with information protected by robust security.

In such a dynamic industry like healthcare, you can count on there being a constant flow of new innovations emerging from a variety of medical researchers, policy experts, technology professionals, and others who provide support to help us do our primary job, taking care of patients.

Things definitely do not stay the same for long in the world of medicine. Healthcare professionals therefore have enormous amounts of information to go through so they can stay up-to-date on the basics.

In order for your medical practice to keep the lights on and maintain the professional staffing level that you and your patients rely on, you must pay close attention to the flow of revenue.

As a forward-thinking individual who wants the most for your medical practice, you already have recognized the importance of using cloud-based healthcare software. The cloud uses multiple redundant facilities to store data to keep it safe in the event of a catastrophic breakdown in any one server center. Its information technology staff is focused on keeping the data safe and secure as well, and is devoted to making sure your patients’ records are available 24/7/365, even when cyber attacks plague institutions that are connected to the Internet.

The world is getting smaller and smaller as more people connect with one another over networked computerized systems. Enhanced connections speed up reaction times as people can communicate more easily, but there are also gains being made as various software and computer systems link up with one another for automated data sharing.

When you’re focused on the day-to-day operations of your medical practice, it can be easy to miss out on news of the latest developments in healthcare technologies and approaches to providing medical assistance or managing your office. A variety of healthcare events have been scheduled that you will want to take advantage of.

Medical acronyms allow people in the healthcare industry to communicate more efficiently by assigning “nicknames,” or abbreviations, to processes, procedures and organizations. Although there are hundreds of acronyms and medical terms used every day in medical care, these 24 are important to every modern practice, if you want to take advantage of incentives and resources available to your organization.

The following excerpt is from an article by Meeri Kim. It originally appeared on Modern Healthcare. In 2001 the Institute of Medicine reported on the need to close the gaping “quality chasm” in U.S. healthcare. The report stressed the importance of delivering patient-centered care.