Message from
Senior Management

Swinging for the Home Run
 

John Danahey
Vice President
Sales and Marketing

Patient Privacy
Endowment Webcasts

Canadian Medication Reconciliation

John Danahey, Vice President - Sales and Marketing

The bases are loaded, there are two outs and my team is down by two runs.  One of our best hitters steps up to the plate and receives the first pitch.  He swings so hard that he not only misses the pitch but he literally knocks himself over.  Two more pitches, two more strikes and the inning is over.

After the game, the player is upset and the situation presents for a great coaching opportunity.  We explain to the player that sometimes you can try too hard.  We don't always need home runs.  Simple base hits are an effective way to win baseball games.  The important thing is that we get people on base and we work to advance the runners.  If we execute the plan well, everyone contributes and we methodically outscore our opponent.

Hospital's IT Projects are now facing similar pressures.  Hospitals are affected by the current economic crisis and cutbacks are widespread.  IT Departments are being pressured to deliver high impact results to create efficiencies that save time and money.  Is it time for the home run swing?  Or is it time to string together a series of base hits that helps to advance the organization?

As you all know, Iatric Systems is not an organization that sells multi-million dollar HIS solutions.  Our focus has always been on providing targeted solutions that help organizations and individual departments succeed one step at a time.  As the economic crisis continues to develop, we invite you to contact us to discuss your challenges.  We aren't looking to sell you home runs, but we sure would like to get some solid base hits that will help you advance your organization.

Last month, we announced a special Endowment to provide a hospital in need with our enterprise-wide patient privacy and security auditing solution, Security Audit Manager.  We invite you to attend a webcast to learn more about this solution and how to apply for the free software.

You'll see Security Audit Manager through the eyes of one of our customers, Delnor Hospital.  One of Delnor's ongoing goals has been to improve patients' privacy.  In order to achieve this goal, the organization needed an automated way to monitor employee access to patient records across its operational HIS systems.  Security Audit Manager automated the monitoring process for Delnor.  It gathered user activity logs from operational systems across Delnor's HIS into one centralized database and provided staff with turnkey reports that identified potential violations.

During the webcast, Dee Ramirez, Systems Analyst, will provide a 'before and after' overview of Delnor's experience with Security Audit Manager.  Trish Voss, Iatric Systems Product Manager, will conclude the session with a brief solution demonstration.  Attend the webcast from the comfort of your own office.  Webcast dates and times are as follows:     
 

To register to attend, simply click one of the dates above and follow the instructions. 

For more information about the Endowment (including information on how to apply), please visit www.iatric.com/endowment.  Application deadline is March 2, 2009. 

Visual FlowSheet is well known for the efficiencies gained at the bedside.  With the versatility to display any clinical data, in any order, at any interval, it's no wonder there are almost 200 hospitals throughout North America relying on Visual FlowSheet to improve patient care.  Throughout the years, we have seen the breadth of value increase as Visual FlowSheet escaped the boundaries of the bedside and now improves processes in Pharmacy, Case Management, Abstracting and so much more! 

 Michelle Schneider, RN, Clinical Marketing Manager, demonstrates Visual FlowSheet at the bedside and beyond. To register select a webcast date below and follow the registration instructions.

Our webcasts are provided at no charge and open to all employees of hospitals operating the MEDITECH HCIS.  Join us to learn more about using Visual FlowSheet at the bedside and beyond!

Accreditation Canada continues to turn up the heat on medication reconciliation.  The requirements have become more definitive; a formal process for both reconciliation and compliance measurement is required.  At Iatric Systems, we are serious about medication reconciliation and its essential role in keeping your patients safe.  We have made it our business to understand these requirements in order to automate the medication reconciliation process in a way that works for clinicians.  This starts when the Best Possible Medication History (BPMH) is maintained with a risk free method for managing transitions and is topped off with a patient friendly Best Possible Medication Discharge List (BPMDL). 

You can use our Patient Discharge Instructions (PDI) and Patient Discharge Prescriptions (PDP) to reconcile medications by pulling all necessary information from different MEDITECH modules onto one screen with editing capabilities.

Michelle Schneider, RN, Clinical Marketing Manager, will demonstrate PDI and PDP. Please join our free demonstration to see how you can utilize these products at your facility. Simply select the webcast date below and follow the registration instructions.

Our webcasts are provided at no charge and open to all employees of Canadian hospitals operating the MEDITECH HCIS. 

Kay Jackson, Marketing Manager - Financial

Delayed but not Forgotten

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) revised the Advance Beneficiary Notice (ABN) form.  Effective March 3, 2009, the CMS will allow providers, physicians, practitioners and suppliers to use the revised ABN for all situations where Medicare payment is expected to be denied.  This new form replaces the ABN-G, ABN-L and the NEMB.  Make sure your staff knows about the new form (CS-R-131) and understands how to complete the ABN to match CMS requirements. To learn more, visit the CMS website. 

The Bid Protest Hearing regarding Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) audits is scheduled for February 9^th and 11^th. This will determine the start date for all audits.  Are you prepared for the impending audits at your facility? Our IatriTRAC solution can ensure that you are ready from start to finish.

Please join us to review the new ABN requirements.  We will introduce ways to ease the transition to full compliance using Medical Necessity Ordermate (MNO).  Additionally we will offer education sessions in relation to the RAC audits and the tool to track events.  Simply select a webcast date below and follow the registration instructions. 

Our webcasts are provided at no charge and open to all employees of hospitals operating the MEDITECH HCIS.  If you have any questions, please email Pamela.Brock@iatric.com.

Utility for Mass Edit of CDS Attributes - MAGIC Only

MEDITECH MAGIC CDS's have an attribute "IFE" which controls whether the cursor stops at a particular field.  If the IFE expression evaluates true, the cursor stops, if the IFE expression evaluates as nil (false) the cursor skips by.

A simple example:  Stop at the field if the patient is male:

IFE=@p.ADM.PAT.sex="M"

To add "Go To" functionality to a screen, you need to attach an IFE to every non-label query so that the cursor skips all but the target query.   The IFE attribute below will skip to a particular query if one is placed in the slash variable /TARGET.

IFE=IF{/S.LAST.QUERY=/TARGET!('/TARGET) 1}

If you have more sophisticated logic to perform at each "IFE" you might want to create your own program as an NPR report macro and attach it to each non-label query on the CDS.   This allows you to edit one central program to modify cursor stopping logic, rather than needing to go to every query on the CDS.  The downside is that MEDITECH will not provide any support for such attributes.

What if you have a CDS with hundreds or thousands of queries?   Attaching IFE attributes to all the queries on a large CDS is very tedious.

Fortunately, with this month's tip, we provide a sample "hot key" program that is smart enough to do a mass edit of CDS attributes.  Since the CDS filer checks attribute validity, it is safe to write attributes into the temporary data of a CDS with a program rather than typing by hand. 

The code is a bit complex, however all you need to do to use it is place it on a hot key menu in MIS as shown in the screen shot and edit the Z.zcus.is.goto.M.add macro to substitute the name of your macro for the "%Z.zcus.is.goto.M.ife(ANS)"  macro which the utility is set up to insert.

Although you do not need to know how it works to use it, here are the gory details:

When you are in Enter/Edit Customer Defined Screen, the data for the screen attributes is in the temp file in a structure that looks like this:

/GXX[Screen Mnemonic]F[field number]AT[attribute number] = attribute code 

If you involve a hot key menu, this temporary file is "stacked" and you get a new temp file, containing the temp data you need to run a MEDITECH NPR routine.  Then before your routine runs, that second temp file is also stacked.

Here is how to put an NPR Report Macro (written as a program) on a hot key menu:

When you pick option 20 from the hot key menu, things look like this:

Your Program

<MIS Hot Key Temp File> (stacked)

<Original Temp File> (stacked below MIS Hot Key Temp File)

In order to "get back" to the original temp file containing the temporary data for the CDS, we need to unstack twice, and to avoid losing the file "in-between" we do it like this:

1) Allocate a disk based file in an "EXT" directory

2) Unstack to the MIS Hot Key Temp File, save it to the disk based file

3) Unstack again to get to the Original Temp File - edit the attributes

Here is the addition of the attribute.  Edit the text in the quotes that is underlined to meet your need.

4) Restack the Original Temp File

5) Allocate a new memory based temp file, copy disk file to it

6) Restack the MIS Hot Key Temp File

7) Delete the disk based file in the "EXT" directory

Here is a demo of how the hot key program works:

After the Hot Key routine has executed, you WILL NOT see asterisks added in the attribute column until after you go into each attribute, or just click with the mouse in the "A/D" column:

A sample report Z.zcus.is.goto has been uploaded to our report library.   It contains the Z.zcus.is.goto.M.add program that inserts attributes from a hot key menu from E/E Customer Defined Screen and it contains a stub program Z.zcus.is.goto.M.ife.  

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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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