Message from
Senior Management

Got ESP?
 

Joel Berman
President
 

Endowment Recipient
Announced

CLMA ThinkLab '09

Joel Berman, President

What a time it is to be in Healthcare IT! One of the hottest topics at the HIMSS conference was ESP. No, not the ESP you're thinking; the Economic Stimulus Package! If the US federal government wants to invest, apparently everyone wants to participate. Both vendors and hospitals were interested in this subject. I truly hope the healthcare industry will use the money wisely. It’s up to all of us to make sure that the money is used wisely, and to provide leadership on the subject. I strongly encourage all of you to participate in the public discussion. Who knows better how to spend the money than all of us?

Our government is also focused on preventing fraud and waste. Patient privacy and security requirements have expanded, and HIPAA now calls for harsher penalties for violations. The RAC audits also begin in earnest this spring. Since RAC auditors have a financial interest in finding fraud, I suspect they will leave no stone unturned. Your hospital needs to be prepared to handle the audits. You need good information, and you need to be organized. Our hottest webcasts lately are demonstrations of our IatriTRAC solution. Like Medical Necessity years ago, when the government gets serious about enforcing a new regulation, people look for dependable, integrated, easy to use solutions. Check out our Revenue Cycle Improvement Tips below for upcoming IatriTRAC webcast dates.

Now that HIMSS is over, the busy spring schedule continues. You’ll see us next at CLMA ThinkLab May 2-5 in Tampa Bay. Then we’ll be exhibiting at International MUSE in Vancouver at the end of May. I hope you plan to attend, but I know many of you can't be there in person because of budget cuts. I suggested to the MUSE board that they allow hospitals to attend remotely via webcast for a small fee. So far, they have rejected my idea. What do you think?

Our patient privacy Endowment recipient was formally announced on April 6, 2009, at HIMSS09 in Chicago. The award was presented to Blount Memorial Hospital, a fully accredited, 380-bed, comprehensive acute care facility located in Maryville, Tennessee.  Liz Amos, Blount Memorial’s Director of Health Information Management and Privacy Officer, accepted the award on behalf of the hospital.

“On behalf of the administration and staff of Blount Memorial Hospital, I would like to thank Iatric Systems for this generous endowment,” said Liz. “Once implemented, Security Audit Manager will provide Blount Memorial Hospital with a more streamlined and focused approach in performing HIPAA investigations, random audits and daily audits of patient information.”

The Endowment includes a license to utilize Security Audit Manager, implementation training and three years of service and support.  A panel of independent judges made up of industry leaders and experts evaluated top finalists and selected the most deserving hospital.  

“We are very excited to present our Patient Privacy Endowment to Blount Memorial Hospital,” said Joel Berman, founder and president of Iatric Systems. “Security Audit Manager is a proven solution, installed in over 100 hospitals across the United States and Canada. This solution will help Blount Memorial significantly reduce the risk of internal security breaches and ultimately ensure patient privacy.” 

Iatric Systems is hosting via webcast repeat performances of all our HIMSS education sessions and booth demonstrations.  Our webcasts are online, real-time sessions you can attend from the comfort of your own office, and they are provided at no charge. Simply select a webcast date below and follow the registration instructions.

If you have any questions, please email Pamela.Brock@iatric.com.

We will be at CLMA  May 2 - 5, 2009 in Tampa, FL.  Come see why MobiLab is ranked #1 in KLAS "Specimen Collection Barcoding" for 2008, 2007 and 2006 (www.KLASresearch.com ©, KLAS Enterprises, LLC.  All rights reserved).

We will feature at CLMA:

-  Improve Patient Safety
-  Physician Office Integration
-  Web Based Physician Portal

MobiLab demos will be held throughout the day at booth #1008.

Come by for several daily opportunities to win a Visa gift card.

Kay Jackson, Marketing Manager - Financial

Revenue Cycle in 2009?

Every week we read about hospitals laying off employees, citing lower revenues, growing uncompensated care, higher out of pocket costs for patients and growing government regulations. The revenue cycle is complex, from scheduling, the access process, medical records coding and final billing to the success or failure of the collections process. Add in denial management and account appeals and you have a process where any error impacts the financial success of the organization. Staff training and reducing turnover plays key roles in a healthy bottom line. Changing the tools your staff uses could be the magic bullet your facility needs in these troubled times. In April we will present webcasts to address different areas of your revenue cycle process:

April 29 and May 7:  a short RAC education session followed by a demo of our RAC and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services audit tracking tool IatriTRAC.

Simply select the webcast date below and follow the registration instructions. Our webcasts are provided at no charge and are open to all employees of hospitals operating the MEDITECH HCIS.

 If you have any questions, please email Pamela.Brock@iatric.com.

Lesser Known Field Attributes  (MAGIC or Client Server)

COMMA=Y,  TRUNC=N,  DEC=n,  ID.AS=@field

Several years ago a student in a RW class asked me how to format numbers with commas.  During a break I wrote a macro to serve as a comma formatting utility and showed the class how to use it from computed fields.  At a subsequent class, during a discussion of "writing your own utility macros", I mentioned the comma formatting, and a student asked "Why not use COMMA=Y".  Duh!

Here are a list of some useful, but lesser known, field attributes for reports.

COMMA=Y

As mentioned above, inserts commas at the thousands place of a standard or computed field.  Save on tedious string parsing and re-assembly.

TRUNC=N

Normally the RW truncates any non-numeric fields if the value exceeds the length defined by the LEN attribute.  Numeric fields are not truncated unless you explicitly set TRUNC=Y

If you are building some small font headers, this is a problem if they need to be placed next to each other on the picture.  You might have a header that is 7 characters long that prints in the space of 5 standard size characters and you cannot allow the field to be 7 characters long and still get the next header to print in the correct spot.

The solution is to add TRUNC=N so all the text prints. 

DEC (w/ data type of ZDEC)

You can Zero fill a field by using the Z.zero.fill program in a computed field:

It is a little quicker to change the data type of the standard field and add a DEC attribute:

DEC=2 provides the number of implied decimal places in the zero filled number.  DEC=2 would mean that 125.92 = 000012592

DEC=0 would mean that 125.92 would become 000000126 (5/4 rounding).

ID.AS

Sometimes it is very handy to provide a computed field with dictionary ID logic.   For example when you have a CD query to collect a "special doctor" during registration:

Without ID.AS, the method to give the user a LI type field in which to enter a list of doctors and selecting against that list requires writing a loop and using some indirect method to collect the list of doctors.

ID.AS makes things much, much easier:

Just build a computed field to get the value of the query, and include ID.AS=@doctor.field:

Then use it as a select field with the LI operator:

Additional Notes:

MEDITECH has a pretty complete list of screen, field, and line attributes (although they forgot TRUNC) on their website.

MAGIC is: http://www.meditech.com/prrw/Pages/RWmbASattributes.htm

C/S is: http://www.meditech.com/prrw/pages/RWcbASattributes.htm

If you wonder what other attributes are omitted from their lists, a peek into the $T Magic program for NPR RW field entry shows that

DASH, SUB, MPHUL and MPAFV are available as field attributes.

DASH just wraps the field in /R.F["d"] and /R.F["D"].  Those values don't seem to exist for laser printing, so I don't know what DASH is for.  The NPR Programmer's reference does not document this attribute either.

SUB allows you to define the last subscript value to be used for a multiple field.  Hard to imagine a use for this one.

MPHUL is "Multiple Page Hold Until Last", a way to hide a field until the last page.  You could use this to print a grand total in the last page trailer of a report

MPHUL=Y on Z.count would put a grand total on the very last page trailer.

MPAFV allows you to print the field value on page 1 and the MPAFV= value on subsequent pages.  Hard to imagine a use for this attribute, possibly useful to do @name on page 1 and name_" continued.." on subsequent pages.

LAB= is a screen attribute to attach a label on a screen for a field.  Does not appear useful for reports.

For Client Server, if we visit the little old man on the Programmer's NPR menu....

We see the following field attributes are available:

The only additional undocumented attribute for C/S is SIZEV, which allows you to adjust the scaling of large fonts. 

You can find additional NPR Tips on our website at http://www.iatric.com/information/npr-tips.asp, as well as information about our on-site NPR Report Writer Training and NPR Report Writing Services.

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Joel Berman, President, Joel.Berman@iatric.com, 978-805-4101
John Danahey, VP, Sales & Marketing, John.Danahey@iatric.com, 978-805-4153

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