Message from
Senior Management

SWOT Away Your Challenges
 

John Danahey
Vice President
Sales and Marketing
 

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SWOT Away Your Challenges

John Danahey, Vice President - Sales and Marketing

You may have heard of it before, but in case you haven’t - A SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning tool that can provide a framework for analyzing your current environment.  As we all know, a good analysis often leads to informed decisions.  SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  It is a fundamental tool taught to business students in colleges and universities, but its application goes far beyond business.

I have found the SWOT Analysis to be a quick and useful tool for all levels of strategy – personally and professionally.  This nifty tool can be applied to a person, place or thing.  The analysis can be as detailed or vague as you need it to be; from a complex spreadsheet to the back of a napkin.  At Iatric Systems, we use the SWOT Analysis to assess our company, products and even individuals.  On a personal level, I’ve been able to apply it to investment decisions and even vacation options.

Strengths and Weaknesses represent internal factors, while Opportunities and Threats pertain to external factors.  For example, if you were preparing to implement CPOE, you may need to evaluate your staffing resources for the project.  Strengths might include strong clinical knowledge and positive relations with your physicians.  A weakness might be the lack of a strong project manager.  On the external side, one opportunity could be ARRA funding because it will help garner strong senior management support for your project.  At the same time, a threat could be the “meaningful use” timelines that conflict with already scheduled projects.

If you want to learn more, you can simply Google the phrase “SWOT Analysis.”  You will find articles and images or charts that are enlightening and easy to apply.

So, the next time you are faced with a tough decision, simply take out a napkin and sketch out a quick SWOT Analysis.  When you are done, you can tell your spouse you decided on Italian for dinner.

If you are attending the Mighty MUSE - Ontario October 7-9, 2009, come a day early for our FREE seminar on October 6, 2009 at the same location!

Register now or for more information, please contact us at info@iatric.com.

Space is limited - so register now!

It takes more than software to run an interface engine.  Your facility needs the appropriate staff to implement and support critical interfaces 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.  Maintaining your own interface engine can result in a vulnerable IT department as employee attrition, illnesses and vacations threaten operational support.  We developed HL7 EasyConnect to remove the hassles of interface engines and gain the benefits of a service-based solution.

Join us for a live demonstration online and at no charge.  Simply select a webcast date below and follow the registration instructions.

If you have questions, please contact Pamela Brock at Pamela.Brock@iatric.com.

Kay Jackson, Marketing Manager - Financial

BAR Reports, indexes, and report efficiency (and news about the MAGIC BAR.PAT.activity.index).

Our usual practice is to use the BAR.BCH dpm for any reports that need to consider all financial activity for a date range, unless the report date range exceeds the batch purge. The BAR.BCH.number.x indexes batches by batch date and therefore allows you to efficiently select just the batch date range of interest in your report.

If your report start date is older than your oldest batches, you need to write in BAR.PAT and, generally speaking, use no index.  For example, if you had to write a report listing certain adjustments for FY 2004, and your batch purge was 300 days, you would write your report in BAR.PAT like this:

Please remember that if you do not use any of the subscripts of an index as selections on a report, adding the index will just make a slow report even less efficient.  Do not add an index "for good luck".

You can make the report more efficient by coding to select only the non-charge transactions.  Selecting on @ txn.class to get all non-charge transactions allows the report to skip all of the charges and loop only on the non-charge procedures.  Adding a selection which is a subscript (of an index or of the detail segment) increases report efficiency.  If you had selected on
@ txn.type NE "CHG" instead, you would not speed up the report, as it would process both charge and non-charge procedures, checking the @ txn.type field of each.

If you are willing to run the risk that a pre-registered account might have adjustments, you can add the admission index to your report and code to skip accounts registered or admitted after the ending date of the report range:

An alternative approach to make the report more efficient is to use the insurance index, if your adjustment codes are associated with certain insurances.   If you are looking for Medicare related adjustment codes, you won't get much if any benefit from using the insurance index, but if you are looking for codes for accounts with a less common insurance, the insurance index can speed up your report significantly. 

If compile time remains an issue, you could code an assumption into your report that adjustments would not be applied to an account more than N days after registration, but this runs the risk that accounts that should be included in the report will be omitted.  An assumption that no account would have an adjustment made more than 600 days after admission/registration could be coded with an additional selection using a date 600 days prior to the start date of the report transaction date range. We compute this with the Z program Z.date.add in an AL START footnote and store the result in the temp file in /FROM.

BAR.PAT.activity.index news flash for magic sites

Historically, the activity index in BAR has had a short (10 day) purge.   Therefore, it was only useful for very short range reporting, such as run today for all BAR transactions yesterday.   Recently I was puzzled to find a MAGIC site with 240 days worth of entries on the BAR.PAT.activity.index and I decided to investigate to see if that was a fluke, or a change in the day close purging logic in BAR.

Looking at some ancient code in a defunct MAGIC 4.6 directory, we can see that the BAR purge of the activity index was a very short 10 days:

In a MAGIC 5.5 system, we see that MEDITECH has extended the purge to equal to the batch purge days, or 40 days, whichever is greater.

(From BAR.DSTATS.close.maintenance)

What this means is that you can write a BAR.PAT report for a txn.bch.date range using the activity index and not worry about a short purge of the activity index.   If you have a report with a lot of demographic data, it is more convenient to write in BAR.PAT than use BAR.BCH and do a lot of txn.account possessive fields.

Unfortunately for Client/Server sites, the activity index file maintenance is still a hardcoded 10 days.

(From BAR.DSTATS.close.maintenance.auto at a 5.5 site)

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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