Message from
Senior Management
Joel Berman
President
Plus
Senior Management
Joel Berman, President
I’m sure many of you spent some time in the last few weeks watching the Olympic Games from Vancouver, Canada. No matter what sport you may be interested in, you have to be impressed with the commitment made by the athletes to pursue their dream. Somewhere along the line, they made a bold decision to get up at 4:00 or 5:00 AM for years to work on their skating routines at the local ice rink. Others chose to live away from home for many years to train with a special coach. Whether they win or lose, their decision to turn their dreams into actions have made them people to admire.
How does this apply to us? Am I suggesting we all run out, grab our skis, and start skiing downhill courses? Of course not, although I’m tempted. What I am suggesting, however, is that we face our own challenges in healthcare with the same boldness shown by the Olympic competitors. Right now we are witness to a very special time, with national attention and resources being devoted to improving healthcare and healthcare information technology. The question is, “Are we bold enough to lead rather than follow?” We allow the politicians, who mean well but know nothing about healthcare, to determine policies on this issue. Seems kind of backwards to me. I applaud hospitals like Citizens Memorial, which is a small MEDITECH customer in South Central Missouri, for their “we can do it” attitude and achieving HIPAA Stage 7 while most other larger and more prestigious hospitals haven’t. They accomplished this because the hospital board and CIO Denni McColm made a decision to commit their hospital to achieving this success. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you try.
I encourage all of you to be bold. I know you have ideas. You have the experience, not the politicians. Make a difference today. Any time you want to talk about your ideas, give us a call. If we can’t help you, we might be able to point you to someone who can — even if they are a competitor.
Date: March 22-24, 2010
Location: The Westin
Chicago North Shore · Wheeling, Illinois
Booth #2
Join us for Education Sessions and Workshops at the MUSE Event in Wheeling. Please see our schedule below.
|
Date |
Time |
Presenter |
Session |
|
Mon- 03/22/10 |
1:00pm CST |
Joe Cocuzzo |
Advanced CDS Attributes for Dummies (for MAGIC sites) |
|
Mon- 03/22/10 |
1:00pm CST |
Mary Moewe |
Project Management 101 |
|
Tues- 03/23/10 |
8:30am CST |
Mary Moewe |
Qualities of a Successful Project Manager |
|
Tues- 03/23/10 |
9:30am CST |
Joe Cocuzzo |
NPR Tips and Tricks / HTML and XML from Reports |
|
Tues- 03/23/10 |
11:00am CST |
Ken Hoffman |
Interoperability – Are You Ready? |
|
Tues– 03/23/10 |
3:00pm CST |
James Lawson |
Protecting Patient Privacy in an Ever Changing Environment |
|
Wed- 03/24/10 |
10:45am CST |
James Lawson |
Making Sense of Meaningful Use |
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about interoperability, project management or NPR Report Writing. Stop by Booth #2 to see us!
For more information, please contact us at info@iatric.com.
In order to effectively transfer data from one facility to another and create interoperability within a health system, hospital IT staffs are frequently faced with connecting hundreds of disparate vendor platforms that have many different interpretations of healthcare industry standards. This is a common and often frustrating challenge for Hospital Information System (HIS) analysts and engineers. Iatric EasyConnect Plus eliminates this headache and saves time by managing and monitoring all interfaces from one easy-to-use, drag and drop graphical user interface and a single support console.
Key benefits of Iatric EasyConnect Plus include:
The next release of Iatric EasyConnect Plus will include Clinical Document Architecture and Critical Care Document support, to help hospitals meet emerging interoperability standards.
To learn more about Iatric EasyConnect Plus and Iatric Systems’ Interoperability solutions, visit www.interop.iatric.com.
Security Planning: Security Risk Assessment Part 2
WEBINAR: Wednesday • April 28, 2010 • 2:00PM Eastern
Part 1 of the series presented why it's critical to build a comprehensive security risk assessment into your hospital's overall security plan. If you were not able to attend, you can click here to see the Part 1 presentation.
Part 2 will present how to develop a plan that reduces your risk and helps your hospital avoid the costly penalties of security breaches.
Register now and you'll learn:
- Why this exercise is vital to your hospital (a short recap from the previous session).
- What criteria will help guarantee a successful, informative and accurate assessment.
- What tools are available.
- What processes are necessary to assure that security risk assessments are performed when required and are integrated with existing IT and business processes.
- How to develop a security risk management plan.
- How to persuade management to buy into your security risk management plan.
Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to conduct a security risk assessment that will help your hospital discover security gaps and prevent costly breaches of patient data.
Johan Lidros
CISA, CISM, CGEIT, ITIL-FJohan is the co-founder and President of Transcendent Group. He has provided IT governance and information security services in the healthcare industry for 18 years in Europe and the United States. Johan is well versed in accepted information security standards and frameworks (ISO27000, HITRUST, etc.) and has participated in several related committees during the years.
Richard Sands
CISA, CISM, ITIL-FRichard is the Director of IT Risk Assurance Services at Transcendent Group. He has spent approximately 18 years in various IT risk management positions in the healthcare and financial industries. Richard has performed numerous security risk assessments in the healthcare industry.
To register to attend, select the date below and follow the instructions.
|
Webcast Date |
Day |
Time |
|
Wednesday |
2:00pm Eastern |
For more information please contact
Pamela Brock at
Pamela.Brock@iatric.com or
978-805-3170.
THIS JUST IN!
IatriTRAC Achieves
AHA’s RACTrac
Compatible Status
STAY TUNED
Kay Jackson, Marketing Manager - Financial
It's in the Bank
According to Healthcare Financial Management Associations (HFMA), self-pay receivable is growing faster than patient revenue at nearly one-third of hospitals. It is most economical to collect payment at the time of service, but many patients need more time to pay due to growing out-of-pocket costs. Predictive auto dialers can notify patients of balances but are certainly not very customer friendly, and mailing a single patient statement can cost around $6.50! How would you like a self-pay collection team that works 24/7 and never takes vacation?
In April, our focus will be on collections using a new, customer friendly method. Iatric Systems will preview our patient portal where the patient can view all their balances, see detailed account information, make payments or even split payments between many accounts. Statistics show that the mother is most likely to pay for bills and favors access via the internet after 10:00 PM at night. Our PtAccess solution makes payment easy on anyone’s schedule, so join us to learn how to make sure your site has money in the bank.
Please join Mark H. Johnson – Manager, IatriConnect Solutions as he demonstrates PtAccess, the patient portal that provides secure access to online account information with bill pay capabilities. To register to attend this 30-minute Powercast, select a date below and follow the instructions.
|
Date |
Webcast |
Day |
Time |
|
PtAccess |
Wednesday |
2:00pm EST |
|
|
PtAccess |
Thursday |
2:00pm EST |
For more information please contact
Pamela Brock at
Pamela.Brock@iatric.com or
978-805-3170.
Educational Session:
Mark April 22 on your calendar to attend a case
management education session on readmits. An article in the New England
Journal of Medicine showed that
20% of all Medicare patients studied during a 15 month period were
readmitted within 30 days of discharge and 34% were readmitted within 90
days. Medicare is considering penalties for hospitals with patient
readmits in less than 30 days.
Carol Everhart, RN and Director of Clinical Informatics for Curaspan
Health Group will present an education session entitled: “Data that
Makes a Difference in Curbing Readmissions.”
To register to attend this 30-minute Powercast, select the date below
and follow the instructions.
|
Date |
Day |
Time |
|
Thursday |
2:00pm EST |
For more information please contact
Pamela Brock at
Pamela.Brock@iatric.com or
978-805-3170.
Joe Cocuzzo, Vice President - NPR Services
Collated Copies from NPR report (MAGIC or C/S)
In MAGIC you
can send the HP number of copies command, and in Client/Server you can
request a number of copies in the print dialog. This gives you Page 1, Page
1, Page 2, Page 2 when you ask for two copies, which is easy for the
printer, but annoying for anyone who wants sets.
This month we will show you an easy way to get collated output out of a
multi-page report.It is possible to split your report into a main report and a fragment and call the fragment the required number of times to get collated output, but this amounts to multiple compiles and that is not very efficient. Additionally, you would need to build the page header in the 'main' report and the output in the fragment, and if you have a page break on a sort field things get ugly.
A better method is to manipulate the temporary sort file to produce a desired number of copies. Here's how:
1) Add a computed sort field as the very first sort field. Set the value of the computed sort field to 1
2) Prompt the user for the desired number of copies. In our example report we create a computed select field with the "IG" operator and we make the select field integer with a length of 1. That prevents the user from asking for more than nine sets, which is probably a good thing as there is an invention called the "copy machine" which is usually a less expensive duplication technology than the HP/Canon invention called "overpriced toner cartridge".
3) Create a macro that runs at the very start of the report to 'expand' the temp file to create a complete new set of entries per each collated copy requested.
Here is a demonstration report that prints patients by location with a page break on the location field:
Setup a "fake sort (xx.sort)" and prompt the user for a number of copies (xx.copies) with IG
With the
"fake sort", the temp file will look like this after your records are
compiled. The first sort is 1 for the entire temp file, as when the
report writer looked at xx.sort with VAL=1, it was the same value for
all records as the temp sort file was built.
To get multiple copies, we just loop thru all the entries with xx.sort =1 and create matching entries with 2 (for second copy) 3 (for third copy), and so on.
To change the temporary file, we call a macro AL HP with a flag so that we only expand the file once.
The client server code for the "page" macro looks like this:
In MAGIC, the temp file gets swapped to the disk when the size of the file hits a certain (MIS parameter driven) number of records. In our MAGIC code, since we probably do not want to expand a temporary file for a compile that large, we do not expand the temporary file if we have exceeded the maximum records that are allowed to compile in the memory based temporary sort file.
If we run for 2 copies, we see that the number of pages doubles (in my test example from 15 to 30 pages) and at page 16 we see the first page of the second collated set of pages:
The example report for both C/S and MAGIC ADM.PAT.zcus.is.eupdate.collated.copies has been placed in our 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.
Upcoming NPR Training Opportunities:
Class |
Hosted By | Location | Date |
Instructor |
| Intermediate/Advanced NPR Report Writer Training | Sumner Regional Hospital | Gallatin, TN | April 14-16, 2010 | Joe Cocuzzo |
For more information or to reserve a seat, please contact Karen Roemer at 978-805-3142 or email karen.roemer@iatric.com.
Follow us on:
Upcoming Events:
MUSE Event - Wheeling
March 22
- 24, 2010
The Westin Chicago
North Shore
(Wheeling, IL)
HIMSS MD 2010
March 25, 2010
Sheppard Pratt Conf. Center
(Baltimore, MD)
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 blog:
On FOCUS
27 Great Pond Drive, Boxford, MA 01921, USA
Copyright 1996-2010 Iatric Systems, Inc. -All Rights Reserved-