Message from
Senior Management
Meaningful Use and the
Great iPhone Conspiracy
Frank Fortner
Sr. Vice President
Applications
Senior Management
Frank Fortner, Sr. Vice President - Applications
Last night, I learned two important lessons. Lesson one: don’t put your iPhone in the front pocket of your swim trunks. Reason being, you might forget it’s there and jump into the water. Lesson two (in the event you fail lesson one): don’t gloat to your wife that iPhone 4.0 is conveniently coming out in 10 days and really, this is all GREAT timing. Suddenly, what started as an innocent lapse in memory turned into a conspiracy theory, even if the unfortunate incident did provide a nice excuse to upgrade. Then I started thinking about healthcare IT. I wonder how many CIOs, caught up in the madness of HITECH and Meaningful Use, are secretly not all that unhappy about the imposed opportunity to purchase new healthcare software and upgrade their systems to the latest and greatest.
The recent 2010 International MUSE conference provided a glimpse into the answer. Attendance was up sharply from the 2009 show in Vancouver, and meeting Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements seemed to be the hot topic of the conference. Many CIOs were there learning from their colleagues and solution providers about various software solutions that could help their hospitals achieve Meaningful Use compliance and bring home the incentive bacon. This was no place for tire kickers; folks I spoke with were driven and deliberate in their conversations at the conference.
I joked about the timing with the comparison to my iPhone incident, but there really does seem to exist a sense of “now or never” within the healthcare industry as a whole. As much as the changes have placed a burden on all sides of the industry, many still feel this is the best chance the healthcare industry has had (or may ever have) to bring about the kind of change that will positively affect the quality of patient care in the United States.
In my experience, the best IT leaders keep a close watch on their current technology investment and constantly wrestle with how to improve and maximize the effect of various systems within their organization. Ask any CIO for their wish list of items to implement; the list is rarely a short one. However, over the past few years hospital budgets have tightened and many software purchases have been delayed or shelved altogether. This is where HITECH pressed the accelerator. Like a soggy iPhone 3GS just days before a version 4 release, meeting Meaningful Use may be the best window of opportunity the healthcare industry will ever have to invest in IT.
Were you unable to attend International MUSE, missed a session while there or simply want to learn more? As a service to you we're hosting a series of webinars reprising all of our 2010 MUSE educational sessions and booth demonstrations. These sessions feature information and solutions around what you have shared as your most pressing issues.
All webinars will be held at 2:00 Eastern Time, provided at no charge and open to all employees of hospitals operating the MEDITECH HIS. To register click the 'date link' below.
For more information or to register, contact Pamela Brock at Pamela.Brock@iatric.com or 978-805-3170.
|
Webcast Presentations |
MAGIC or C/S |
Webcast Date (s) |
|
C/S |
||
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
MAGIC |
||
|
C/S |
||
| Medication Verification on a Handheld Device |
MAGIC |
|
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
Both |
||
|
MAGIC |
||
|
C/S |
||
|
Both |
|
Educational Session Presentations |
Webcast Date |
| Barcode Specimen Collection | |
| Audits, Audits Everywhere – How Can We Survive? | |
| Interoperability – Are You Ready? | |
| Sometimes It Feels Like a WRECKonciliation | |
| A First Look at the New FOCUS Report Designer | |
| Protecting Patient Privacy in an Everchanging Environment | |
| Staying on FOCUS in a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World | |
| Personal Health Records and Healthcare Consumerism | |
| Making Sense of Meaningful Use | |
| Mobile Madness |
We are pleased to offer NPR Report Writer training sessions at host sites this fall. Details and a course description are available on our website at http//www.iatric.com/npr/class-schedule.asp.
| Location | Level |
Instructor |
Date |
Cost |
|
John Muir Health 1400 Treat Blvd. Walnut Creek, CA (Oakland area) |
Beginner/Intermediate | Richard Serrano | Sept. 22-24, 2010 | $750 |
|
Children's
Specialized Hospital New Brunswick, NJ |
Beginner/Intermediate | Joe Cocuzzo | Oct. 20-22, 2010 | $750 |
To subscribe for email notifications for new classes, please follow this link: http://www.iatric.com/npr/class-schedule.asp.
If you have any questions or would like
to register, please contact Karen Roemer at
Karen.Roemer@iatric.com or 978-805-3142.
Each year, Healthcare Informatics (HCI) publishes a list of the top 100 healthcare IT vendors: The Healthcare Informatics 100. This list is created by a team of researchers and analysts who sort through data and information from vendors that self-report their revenues to Healthcare Informatics. Iatric Systems is ranked #84 on the list.
Healthcare Informatics' June issue is
on stands now. To view the complete list,
visit
the
HCI 100 List.
Kay Jackson, Marketing Manager - Financial
Non-clinical staff can cause HIPAA exposures
Sometimes we overlook the staff members within the hospital who have critical and possibly unmonitored access to protected health information (PHI). PHI is more than just patients’ clinical information. If financial information is compromised, it can be even more damaging for the patient. I read almost every week about breaches in patient data occurring; non-clinical staff members are a big part of many of the breaches.
Some recent HIPAA incidents were traced to clerical staff members stealing social security numbers and other demographic information from the HIS system or paper documents. The staff member then sold the information or used the data to commit identify theft. One recent incident resulted in a five-year jail term for the employee. Privacy breaches are not only expensive for the patient and the hospital but also negatively impact the hospital’s reputation in the community.
With HIPAA, the old adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is so true. Iatric Systems offers several technologies that might be that preventative ounce. Security Audit Manager provides proactive patient privacy monitoring and reduces the risk of internal security breaches. IatriScan tracks who scanned a document or looked at the resulting image, providing an audit trail for review if account information is compromised. We also offer Visual SmartBoard, which tracks suspicious activity that might be related to identity theft. Don’t let your facility be the next HIPAA news item I read.
Joe Cocuzzo, Vice President - NPR Services
Report Writer 101 Show Run-Time Selections on Report (including lists)
One of the most common uses of computed fields on a report is to print the user's run time selections on a report.
For fields where you use the EQ, NE, or IG selection operator, the value entered by the user is stored in c.field.name, for example:
To print the value entered by the user, create a computed field as follows:
For extra credit, you might want to print "ALL" if the user accepted the default keyword:
Since the Report Screen stores an ASCII 127 in the b. c. or e. fields when the keyword ALL, BEGINNING, or END is used, you can test for the D(127) value and print the appropriate text with an IF statement in your computed field.
If the selection operator GE or GT is used:
If the selection operator LE or LT is used:
PS: The field "inpatient.location" provides a lookup on just the inpatient locations, and is more convenient than a selection on the location field for reports confined to inpatients.
What happens to a list (LI) of locations?
A list is stored like this:
If you want to print the locations from the list, you need to loop thru the values stored as subscripts of c.inpatient.location and either concatenate them into a long line or list them with an MV array. If you use an MV array in a page header, be careful to make sure that the number of entries will never exceed the size of the page, otherwise you will loop until your printer is out of paper.
The most compact way to list them would be in a line in the page header:
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.
Learn about the Report Designer from Joe's posts at On FOCUS.
Follow us on:
Sign up for our Updates! newsletter, or do so by visiting the lower section of our website's homepage.
You can unsubscribe from this newsletter using the SafeUnsubscribe link at the bottom of this email or by sending us a request at info@iatric.com.
If you received this newsletter via email, you may give us feedback by simply replying to the email. However, if you would like to reach someone directly, please feel free to contact one of the individuals listed below.
Joel Berman, President,
Joel.Berman@iatric.com,
978-805-4101
John Danahey, VP, Sales & Marketing,
John.Danahey@iatric.com,
978-805-4153
Follow us on our blogs:
On FOCUS
Patient Privacy Matters
27 Great Pond Drive, Boxford, MA 01921, USA
Copyright 1996-2010 Iatric Systems, Inc. -All Rights Reserved-