Message from
Senior Management

We Have Your
Blind Side

Frank Fortner
Sr. Vice President
Applications

Your Road to Interoperability
Starts Here

CLMA ThinkLab
2010

Frank Fortner, Sr. Vice President - Applications

This past weekend, I took my family to see the movie, "The Blind Side" and discovered that a major theme in the movie was trust. The film is based on a true story about a family that takes in a disadvantaged young man and gives him their trust, which he eventually returns to them and perhaps to society as a whole. The title comes from the left tackle position in football whose job is to block opponents from reaching the quarterback, effectively protecting his "blind side". When a quarterback trusts that his teammates have his back, he is able to focus on surveying the field, delivering the ball, gaining yardage and ultimately scoring points. Working for Iatric Systems has often felt like playing left tackle, taking care of business in the trenches so our customers can focus unabatedly and successfully on the job of providing quality patient care.

In most hospitals today, the gridiron of information technology is virtually everywhere. When designed, developed and deployed properly, few would question the value it brings to enhancing both the quality and efficiency of patient care. However, when technology doesn't perform well, caregivers end up shifting their focus away from patients to the battle in the trenches. For example, nurses shouldn't be worrying about monitor results getting into the NUR system or searching for lost orders. Likewise, phlebotomists shouldn't be dealing with mislabeled specimens or wondering whether or not they're going to lose their wireless network connection.

This is where it pays to have a trusted vendor on your team. The CIO as quarterback of IT needs to know that software will function and appropriate data will pass to the various receiving systems in a timely and secure manner, as designed in the playbook with no surprises. The last thing he or she needs to deal with is a blitz of unexpected setbacks or costly rookie mistakes that could result in a delay of game, moving the project timeline backward. Software platform upgrades, Meaningful Use objectives, patient privacy and data security are just a few of the challenges in healthcare IT today. Now more than ever, IT leaders need trusted partners who will have their back when the blitz is on.

When it comes to trust, experience is the must. That means trust can only be earned over time, play by play, project by project, implementation by implementation. Trust isn't handed out to rookies with slick sales presentations or glossy marketing brochures. Trust comes only when software providers consistently deliver what they sell you, on time and with the functionality promised. Iatric Systems is celebrating our 20th year in business and we have thousands of software implementations under our belt. Feel free to contact us and find out why over 900 hospitals have chosen Iatric Systems to protect their blind side.

New Interoperability Website Launched

Join us at the CLMA ThinkLab '10 Conference in Las Vegas, NV in Booth #109.  Come by to discover how to make your specimen labeling errors disappear. 

"We had no mislabeled specimens in any of the areas using MobiLab^® the very first month after go-live!" - Janet Johnson, Director of Nursing Informatics - Norman Regional Health System.

MobiLab^® is designed to eliminate patient identification and specimen labeling errors while increasing the productivity of your phlebotomy and nursing staff.

See you in Las Vegas at Booth #109!

Kay Jackson, Marketing Manager - Financial

Medical Necessity is Here to Stay

Commercial payors utilized the term medical necessity long before Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) applied the Advanced Beneficiary Notice (ABN) for Medicare patients' requirements.  The transmittal updates for ABNs are continually changing.  The most recent update R1840CP addressed guidance on the voluntary use of ABNs.

Last year at International MUSE during one of my education sessions, I asked the group how many hospitals still did not have a process to check outpatient medical necessity consistently throughout the facility in all areas where the ABN rules apply.  Not surprisingly, about 25% of attendees reluctantly raised their hands. 

It's not too late to address the ABN requirements and if you need some assistance convincing management, just let me know. Write offs for ABN failures could be costing your hospital thousands of dollars in lost revenue each year. While outpatient ABNs are not yet a published target of Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC), it is only a matter of time before inpatient medical necessity for Medicare patients will be a RAC target.

You'll have a chance to hear from Sandy Pederson, West Park Hospital and Judy Peel, Mercy Regional Medical Center on how they integrated medical necessity into their workflow.  Join us for a 30 minute Powercast on medical necessity ABN requirement checking.  If you would like to attend, please follow the registration link below.

I will also present two 30-minute Powercasts reviewing RAC audit tracking and patient signature capture technology.  To register to attend, select a date below and follow the instructions.

Joe Cocuzzo, Vice President - NPR Services

Create a patient directory including empty beds (MAGIC or Client/Server)

It is easy to write a report to list all your current inpatients (and observation patients in a bed).   Just write in ADM.PAT and use the room and bed index.

What if you want to see the empty rooms and beds?

You could write a "main" report in MIS.ROOM.DICT (MAGIC) or MIS.ROOM (C/S) with a fragment in ADM.PAT to get each patient, but that would be more work than necessary (and fragments are so slow they are worth avoiding if you can).

On the "Sort Select" tab (aka Page Two), just add a page break by location and restrict to the active rooms:

Notice that the subscripts that default (and are required) are MIS.ROOM.mnemonic and MIS.ROOM.bed.  The whole name is needed because the report is in ADM.PAT, but we have selected a detail segment from another DPM entirely.  This would not work between ABS and BAR for example, but since every application is open to MIS, using an MIS dictionary DPM in an ADM report works just fine.

On the picture put the MIS.ROOM fields you want, plus any patient fields you would like to see:

The critical last step is to use the room and bed fields from the MIS dictionary to go get the patient's adm.urn from the room and bed index.  We can write code in a footnote to do this, as follows:

In C/S:

In MAGIC, you've got the "DICT" to include, so you can just squeeze in the code:

Note that you can write a line of code in a footnote, if it fits.  You cannot wrap the code to multiple lines:

Note:

When you translate you will get an error message about all the ADM.PAT fields you have used:

You can ignore this message, as the special code in the footnote takes care of putting the value into ADM.PAT.urn.

Here is some sample output from a C/S test directory:

The report: ADM.PAT.zcus.is.directory.with.empty.beds has been uploaded to our C/S and MAGIC report libraries.

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.

Upcoming NPR Training Opportunities:

For more information or to reserve a seat, please contact Karen Roemer at 978-805-3142 or email karen.roemer@iatric.com.

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