Whether you're a current customer of theirs or not, if you work at a MEDITECH hospital, you likely have heard of him or of his company, Iatric Systems.  We were lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with Joel Berman, President of one of the largest MEDITECH vendors out there and…

I am restarting this list with one question and others can post behind me.

1.Can you explain the sort fields and the use of header and trailer keys in different ways to sort data?

A multiple is a field that repeats.  I’m sure all of you have run into multiples while using MEDITECH whether you realize it or not.  For this blog entry I’m going to get a little technical to help you understand how multiples are stored and why the MEDITECH report writer translator expects certain formatting on the picture.  (Note:  for this example I’m using DPM: ABS.PAT and DETAIL SEGMENT: abs.pat) …

A 54-year old female presents with acute upper left quadrant abdominal pain, radiating to her back and is worse immediately after eating. Initial physical examination reveals the patient has a fever, low blood pressure, rapid heart and has been nauseated for 12 hours. The patient has been on a tapering dose of prednisone over the last two weeks for treatment of asthma.

What kind of clinical decision support can you offer the doctor who will perform CPOE for this patient? In…

In today’s submission I’d like to go over possessives.  I was working with a client recently who’s new to the NPR Report Writer.  He wrote a report to capture all expired patients discharged within a user-define date range.  His report kept producing ‘no records found’ even though he knew patients expired within the date range he entered.

His facility used multiple expired…

The following blog post is designed to help guide you through the process of establishing public health interfaces for your MEDITECH hospital. Additional resources are provided.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) supports the Meaningful Use public health mandates because they are designed to improve the health in our communities and our nation. These mandates help communities prepare for emerging medical…

We see it in the news everyday. Hundreds of privacy breaches are reported, affecting millions of patients. The cause of the breaches could be for many reasons.  It could be due to theft of laptops or other devices (especially mobile) that house patient data; identity theft by someone who was authorized to access patient data but did so inappropriately; or patient data being accessed inappropriately by third parties. Whatever the reason, breaches continue the upward…

Meditech has long encouraged the integration of Data Repository as part of the necessary core components of their HIS.  However, I think even Meditech itself sometimes underestimates the potential value and productivity benefits that are inherent in a standard SQL database environment.  The mere existence of the DR has even spawned the creation of new dedicated vendors and innovative reporting products that try to capitalize on the information contained in the vast…

I often hear from clients that MEDITECH's NPR Report Writer is cumbersome, difficult to use, and incredibly frustrating.  The reality is, yes, it can be frustrating, but it’s an amazingly powerful tool that anyone can learn to help them in their job regardless of role as long as some basic concepts are understood.  In an effort to help users learn more about it, I wanted to create step-by-step blog posts that hopefully will allow someone with little MEDITECH…

There are few things that strike terror into the hearts of approving managers on a more regular basis than the site of another stack of dreaded inter-office envelopes on their desks. Reviewing employee performance reviews, onboarding packets, capital requests, and other documents is a time-consuming task, and that’s assuming that the paperwork makes it to the right person. And once a form has been reviewed and signed, someone has to enter data into a third-party…

As Alexandre Garrett pointed out Continuity of Care Document (CCD) has become a generic term, when it actually refers to a formal specification from Hl7 and ASTM.  Fortunately, the Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements are a bit more specific about…

If you are tasked with developing and implementing the interoperability strategy for your MEDITECH hospital, then you are most likely faced with the challenge of choosing a data standard for exchanging information with different healthcare systems. This blog post specifically talks about the need for a patient summary document and how “CCD” has become the vernacular term for a summary document, which is not always the case. And as you go through the process of…

As MEDITECH facilities move from paper to hybrid to fully electronic medical records, there are many considerations – dealing with CPOE, Bedside Medication Verification/eMAR and PDocs, to name just three.

But two crucial factors are often overlooked:  how to move efficiently away from the limitations of pre-printed paper forms, and how to get data from forms and clinical systems/devices into MEDITECH Scanning and Archiving…

Many hospitals that run MEDITECH are using the Scanning and Archiving (SCA) module, and most of those that are moving to 6.0 are being encouraged to do so.

The benefits of SCA and other enterprise content management (ECM) systems are indisputable – no more file cabinets, instant access to patient and business documents across the facility, and, ultimately, improved patient care and safety due to increased information accuracy…

Boston WorkStation is task automation software that allows healthcare organizations to automate thousands of common tasks, manage workflow and improve productivity.

One of our customers, Tony Lettera, is constantly looking for areas where automation can reduce time and provide accurate results. As part of their Meditech upgrade,…

After working for years with Meditech hospitals, I've more or less figured out a few different headaches that every Meditech user runs into at some point.  You've got an issue with an integrated product but don't know how to reach out to your vendor.  You wonder if an issue you have is even worth asking.  Or you're struggling with a build, DTS or HIPAA requirement and know other people are out…

Whether it's an upgrade, a vendor change or even a small project that your facility needs help on, there are easy ways to spot the best consultants out there for your Meditech project.  Why should it matter?  I've seen first hand the…

We're introducing a new CIO Sitdown series designed by maxIT's VP Global MEDITECH Practice Director Jack Walker where hospital CIO's are interviewed on real topics regarding their MEDITECH products.  Here is part 2 of Jack's interview with Rob Rhodes, CIO of Houston Healthcare, on his experiences with their recent implementation from Magic to 6.0.  If you haven't already seen it,…

This is a large file, but these are PDoc samples originally created based off of around 90 Tsheets that were then grouped down to about 40. 

As these were built, we noticed there were really only 2 sections that changed.  At the same time, Dragon became more of a priority than originally planned (Scope Creep?).

Since having Dragon was a driving factor for ED physicians to own and embrace the changes, the templates were streamlined to 5 templates (long and…

Attached is canned text that mimics the macros that some physicians created within Dragon to use as another option for those users that are not licensed with Dragon.  PDoc ED Canned Text