Recently lots of effort has been made to obtain the next-to-leading-order and Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal corrections to the thermal dilepton emission rate in perturbative QCD. Here we apply these results to the plasma created in heavy-ion collisions and see whether these corrections improve the comparison between theoretical calculations and experimental results for the invariant mass dependence of the dilepton emission rate. In particular, we simulate the quark-gluon plasma produced at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN using 2 + 1-dimensional viscous hydrodynamical simulations. We compare our results to those of the STAR experiment and comment on the need for a nonperturbative determination of the dilepton rate at low invariant mass.