As many of you have heard, Dr. Sheffield is planning on retiring at the end of the year. His presence will, of course, be missed by all of us in the office, as well as so many of his patients who have worked with him here in Santa Barbara for over 15 years. Dr. Lowenstein will certainly be looking forward to providing ongoing plastic surgery care for all patients in Santa Barbara, and we anticipate that there will be a seamless transition at Montecito Plastic Surgery. We have hired some new staff (like me!) to aid in patient coordination, and many of our staff, like our outstanding nurse, Susanne, will remain with us (forever, we hope!). We are also not letting our front desk receptionist, Hayden, leave as we are unsure how we would cope without her!

We do want to remind our plastic surgery patients that as the end of the year approaches, both Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Lowenstein are trying to accommodate all of the patient requests for surgery that we can. The schedule is filling up, however, and so we encourage our plastic surgery patients to plan ahead and accordingly, especially if you are looking to have your plastic surgery before the end of the year. In fact, as January is a popular month for plastic surgery in Santa Barbara, Dr. Lowenstein’s plastic surgery schedule is getting filled already.

Please feel free to call us with any questions or requests and we will do our best to accommodate you!

-Alexandra Essex

We at Montecito Plastic Surgery are very excited about the changes that we are implementing around the office- new art on the walls, new staff additions, and new technology that is going to help us to provide state of the art services to our plastic surgery patients here in Santa Barbara.

As we move the office to an Apple-Mac based facility, we are bringing in the most comprehensive new medical software available. One of the most significant transitions that we are making is an implementation of a program called MacPractice- a scheduling and patient management software package that additionally has an electronic medical record (EMR). This will allow patient records to be stored on our secure server and viewed at each of the computers in the Montecito Plastic Surgery facility. No more tracking down paper charts, or struggling to find a piece of information buried on one of the pages therein. With the EMR software, each visit is categorized and easily accessible, and each data point about a patient, such as a medication list, is easily retrievable anywhere in the facility.

Additionally, we will be adding imaging software that will categorize patient photos with each chart, making reference to them easy for all of our staff, as well as patients who want to see what they used to look like before their plastic surgery procedure in Santa Barbara. All information is totally secure, with a multiple password encryption system to and redundant computer backups to ensure that our patient information is safe. This software package is being customized to Dr. Lowenstein’s specifications at Montecito Plastic Surgery in Santa Barbara- no other facility in the world has this specifically exclusive level of technology.

How else can this program help? For those patients who require correspondence between our plastic surgery facility and other physicians, doctors’ notes can easily and quickly be generated and sent to other physicians through the mail or electronically. Information from previous surgeries, other doctor’s notes and letters, and previous tests that our plastic surgery patients have undergone will be easily and quickly scanned into our server at Montecito Plastic Surgery, allowing easy reference and access to them. And as a further bonus, the electronic medical record will allow us to rid ourselves of the ugly mass of current paper charts, as well as our file cabinets, leaving more room for some of the outstanding original artwork that Dr. Lowenstein is moving into the facility!