Message from
Senior Management

Credibility through Propaganda
 

Ken Hoffman
Vice President
Interface/Integration

2009 ASHP Conference

Scripting
MEDITECH's
Software

Credibility through Propaganda

Ken Hoffman, Vice President - Interface/Integration

I’ve been working in the IT Healthcare industry since 1991. I actually worked as a weekend support technician at a MEDITECH hospital babysitting MEDITECH DG servers and printing reports in 1991. After I finished college in 1993, I became a programmer/analyst for a hospital IT department, which is where I learned MEDITECH programming and applications. Why tell you all this? So I can say I’ve been around the MEDITECH machine for some time now, from programmer/analyst to management. 

While attending a MUSE conference in the late 90s, I believe in Orlando, MEDITECH VP Roberta Grigg said $T RAD would never be converted to NPR, hospitals would have to go with Client/Server ITS. Soon after that another MEDITECH VP, Scott Koretz, said they were planning on developing an NPR version called ITS. That was my first introduction to the MEDITECH propaganda machine in action and I’ve been watching it spin ever since. 

Over these 18 years I’ve seen MEDITECH correspondence mailed to customers making statements like, “MEDITECH does not support or allow any other vendors to do any interfaces with the MEDITECH system.” Or, “we do not support third party vendors on our MAGIC machines.” When Client/Server came out in the late 90s, the same propaganda was spread throughout the community, which we all know now to be false. 

This type of correspondence emerges just about every five years. Most hospitals just ignore it, but since the point is raised some hospitals ask whether it is true. Well it’s about that time again and it’s all related to FOCUS. (MEDITECH has changed the name, removing the word FOCUS; it’s now MEDITECH 6.0, check out www.meditech.com). Propaganda is being spread throughout the community that no third party vendors can interface with MEDITECH 6.0. In fact the propaganda has gotten so bad that MEDITECH surrogates are spreading it even though they know it’s false. 

What could be gained by surrogates or even MEDITECH spreading propaganda? Credibility? I always thought if you communicate statements as fact and they’re later proven to be false, you lose credibility. I’m not sure what anyone stands to gain by spreading propaganda that no one can interface to MEDITECH 6.0. First of all it’s not true. I know this because we’re interfacing to MEDITECH 6.0 today, both outbound and inbound HL7. Second, hospitals want to know they have options to meet their needs when MEDITECH can’t. Third, third party vendors complement MEDITECH, they do not take away from it. MEDITECH should embrace third party options and help dispel the propaganda. 

Some of you might remember the MEDITECH language history; from MIIS, MAGIC, NPR, CS, FS, and now MEDITECH 6.0. Most of these had some “can’t interface” propaganda around them. Let me dispel the MEDITECH 6.0 propaganda now, it’s not true - we’re doing it and others are too. If you hear someone pass this propaganda your way, tell them “the spin stops here” or you can just send them my way for reprogramming. 

Using barcode specimen collection to improve patient safety is a great goal, but not all systems are created equal. Norman Regional Health System can attest to this fact after its first barcode specimen collection system failed to deliver. 

The organization replaced that system in August with MobiLab. The results were positive patient identification, accurate specimen labeling and other benefits throughout the organization.  

Real-time label printing was the greatest single benefit for Norman Regional because it directly impacts the accuracy of specimen identification and was something their previous system could not provide. Some of the other benefits include improved specimen credibility through accurate draw orders and handling instructions, fewer automation line rejections and faster STAT turnaround times.  

Nurses, phlebotomists and respiratory therapists use MobiLab throughout all inpatient units and at off-site collection facilities. Depending on their needs, staff are able to use their choice of hardware – wireless handheld devices, workstations on wheels (WOWs) and/or stationary computers.  Specimen collection is now safer, easier and faster for everybody. To learn more, download the Norman Regional Health System’s MobiLab Success Story.

Scripting MEDITECH’s Next Generation Workstation Software

Getting data out of MEDITECH is fairly straightforward with tools such as the NPR report writer.  Getting data back into MEDITECH is quite a different story and often calls for creative solutions such as “scripting.”  The basic idea behind scripting is fairly simple.  A human typist knows to type something and wait for a response from the system indicating their keystrokes had the desired effect.   If the typist sees an error message as a result of their actions, they are able to make a decision and adjust their actions appropriately.  A good scripting solution gives a script programmer a set of tools allowing them to replicate this action/response/decision feedback cycle to accomplish a desired task.

Scripting in MEDITECH has been around for over 20 years.   In the early days, a mouse was a rodent and we worked exclusively with keystrokes and text that lined up nicely in rows and columns.  A script programmer only worried about sending keystrokes and reading text or finding the cursor.  As we move into the mouse-driven graphical world, script programmers must now deal with “objects” such as text boxes, buttons and various other “clickable” items which can only be controlled with a mouse.  We’re also finding the concept of a cursor is going away and text is often painted on the screen in a proportional font as a picture instead of plain text a user could otherwise highlight, copy or paste.

To continue to meet the needs of MEDITECH customers, a scripting solution needs to provide a more robust set of tools to allow script programmers to interact with these new “clickable” screen objects.   In addition, next generation scripting tools should be capable of presenting text drawn graphically in a more useful and script-friendly manner.  A scripting tool should provide a familiar row and column addressable layer for working with text while introducing a new layer of clickable objects to interact with.

To ease old-school text programmers into this new layered world, a scripting tool might present the next generation MEDITECH user interface as literally two different layers.   This gives the script programmer the flexibility to work the top “object” layer to control “clickable” items while still being able to read and make decisions based on a more familiar text layer that can be read using a row and column coordinate system.

Of course with new objects, tools, and commands, a scripting language is likely to become more complex.  There will be new concepts, commands and syntax to learn.  Ideally, a next generation scripting tool should shield the script programmer from having to worry too much about the details of these new commands.  A recording mechanism should allow a script programmer to automatically generate the correct commands by simply performing the desired task while the scripting tool watches them work.

Script “recordings” are not new and have been around since the text-only days. Surprisingly, the introduction of clickable objects makes a recording feature better at automatically generating script code.  In the text world, the programmer had to think about how to tell the scripting tool to test for a text-only event.   Perhaps after picking a numeric menu item, the programmer had to decide how to tell the script to wait for the next menu or screen to come up before sending the next sequence of keystrokes.   A recording feature helped the programmer with identifying the correct row and column coordinates but the programmer still had to worry about coding a test for the desired outcome.  With clickable objects, a script recording will automatically know to “wait” for the object to appear before attempting to click on it.  In most cases, the recording mechanism should be able to nail down a syntax-perfect script that can be immediately run without modification.

In short, it appears the next generation of MEDITECH clients has made scripting easier instead of harder.  Script programmers are now able to stay more focused on the purpose of the script rather than the details of the syntax.   They can record syntax-perfect navigation and then modify their recordings into intelligent, decision making data entry scripts.  They’ll continue to impress their peers by pumping large volumes of data into the next generation MEDITECH client just as they’ve done for years in the text based world. 

Kay Jackson, Marketing Manager - Financial

Create a download file and open it with Excel automatically (MAGIC or C/S)

Both MAGIC and Client Server have a method you can use in an NPR report to pass a file and get a computer application to open the file if there is an association between the file type and an application.  For example "doc" typically opens with Word, "xls" or "csv" with Excel, and "txt" with Notepad.

In MAGIC, you can use  %Z.link.to.shell(A) where A is the url, the filename and path or the filename with the share

In C/S, you can use @ Shell.execute(A) in the same way.

However, you have a problem to overcome if you want to both create a file via PRINT ON: DOWNLOAD and open it in the same report.  Even if you put the code to open the file in a CLOSE.UP macro (which is the last point in the report program where you can insert code) the file will not be written and you will have a share violation when the computer application tries to open it.

The solution is to include a call to %Z.rw.close.up "early" so that the file gets written to the computer and closed.  Then you can call %Z.link.to shell (MAGIC ) or @ Shell.execute (C/S) and the file just created will be opened by the associated application on the computer.

Here is an example use of this technique in both MAGIC and C/S to download a tab delimited file to an "xls" file and open the file immediately in Excel.  You can also write a comma delimited file if you have the "csv" extension associated with Excel.

Create a tab delimited file in the usual fashion:

(MAGIC Version)

(C/S Version) - Picture is the same, add a PFF NO footnote to suppress "Page" form feeds.

MAGIC "close" Macro:

C/S is very similar, except for @ Shell.execute macro vs Z.link.to.shell program call.

Here is a demonstration at a MAGIC site:

An example report:  ADM.PAT.zcus.is.auto.open.excel has been posted to our MAGIC and C/S report library.

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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