Has your MEDITECH hospital deferred one or two public health interfaces to Stage 2? If so, this blog post will provide you with resources to help you get the answers you need for connecting your MEDITECH system to public health agencies and registries.

In Stage 2 Meaningful Use, all three Public Health Interfaces are required Core Objectives, and you must establish live data transmissions. Iatric Systems has worked with State…

PatientWorks Corporation provides healthcare providers with self-service patient check-in kiosks and electronic forms management solutions integrated with your MEDITECH software.  KioskWorks^® solutions include features to allow your patients to quickly and easily check-in, verifying demographic information, allowing collection of…

Many healthcare IT vendors promise grand, sweeping benefits that will help hospital CIOs like me achieve our wildest dreams of efficiency, productivity, improved patient care, and a complete Electronic Health Record (EHR). The trouble is that by overreaching and overselling, it is hard for some vendors to accomplish what they promise, because they are focused on what they think we want to hear, instead of what we are trying to achieve.…

What is really required to meet the Meaningful Use “protect electronic health information” objective? The objective states that healthcare organizations need to protect electronic health information created or maintained by the certified EHR technology through the implementation of appropriate technical capabilities. The measure asks for a security risk analysis in accordance with HIPAA 45 CFR 164.308(a)(1).

I don’t…

I have been working as an engineer in the MEDITECH space for over 11 years now, and boy, how time flies.  And if I’ve learned anything throughout the years, it’s to “have a fall back plan."  We are constantly engaged at PPI to migrate MEDITECH data or MEDITECH servers, both physical and virtual.  Sometimes the migration is a simple as a file copy of a single server and sometimes it’s as complicated as migrating an entire ESX cluster to a new storage array on a new…

By now, every hospital and provider knows that they have to provide their patients with online access to their records, and allow for viewing, downloading, and transmitting of these records. This is evident by the recent survey from National eHealth Collaborative. When asked to name their top patient engagement priorities for 2013, the majority of stakeholders identified these goals:

• Meet patient engagement requirements…

Meaningful Use Stage 2 will kickoff later this year, and with it comes a number of new and challenging patient engagement objectives that will require a patient portal. Hospitals and eligible professionals will need to meet the new “view, download, transmit” objective, which requires at least 5% of unique patients discharged / seen during the reporting period access their health information online. Eligible professionals additionally have a new “secure messaging”…

As the deadline quickly approaches for Meaningful Use Stage 1, I have spoken with many hospitals that are way ahead of the curve.  “Yes, we have attested for Stage 1 and are well into working on Stage 2.”  Their voice carries a proud and confident cadence, as it should.  Obtaining Meaningful Use CQM requirements is only one core measure and a big job which requires the precise attention of internal resources who know Meditech and clinical operations inside and…

I love HealthWare. Based on what some other facilities have and don’t have, the tool is amazing. I have never had the opportunity to truly experience workflow like this. I have been creating accounts, getting errors, fixing errors...estimating... ahhh in love! I spoke with the schedulers and they said that they use the Active Fax tool daily. It's second nature. Their exact words are "we love it".  They said the Chicago team (Helpdesk) are ALWAYS…

Summit Health (Chambersburg and Waynesboro Hospitals) in Pennsylvania approached us with a problem:  They wanted their Unit Secretaries to be involved with the workflow for CPOE but felt like Meditech lacked automated support in this area. 

According to Ruth Ludwig, Manager of System Applications at Summit, …

A bomb was dropped on the Healthcare IT world last month with the announcement of the CommonWell Alliance, a series of large hospital vendors who are pledging to produce interoperability standards to easily share data between hospitals.  Long story short, all of these vendors are basically saying that they are going to…

If there is such a thing as a holy grail of DR reporting, this may be it.  Not only is it possible to access DR data across SQL servers, but it’s also possible to combine data from different sources in the same query!  Normally this isn’t much of a problem, but the DR adds an extra challenge because of the special collation settings.

Collation??  What’s that?

In simple terms, collation…

We've all been there.  We're in the middle of our go live and we find ourselves wondering, what am I missing?  It's impossible to plan for everything, but hopefully these 5 tips are a good starting point.

1. Your job profiles are not ironclad.

Every hospital has one opportunity during go live to ensure that their job profiles are built properly at the…

For those MEDITECH hospitals that deferred public health interfaces from Stage 1 to Stage 2, now is the time to start looking at implementing your other public health interfaces so you can meet the first reporting period for Stage 2 starting on October 1, 2013.

In Stage 1 Meaningful Use, the three public health interface mandates are Menu Set Objectives. Only one of the three needed to be implemented, and you only need to show the capability to send the data. Public health…

For many Meditech users, SQL training can be a very expensive or time consuming proposition. One can always attend the official Microsoft Training classes which are very good, but can be also be expensive.

I have always had to keep an eye on what are the best training resources for my…

We took a second to stop through MEDITECH's booth at HIMSS 2013 in New Orleans to see their latest and greatest offerings.  After talking, we figured why not take the time to shoot some video for MEDITECH Connect members who couldn't make the trip.  That led to a series of videos below which go through each of…

Writing better queries is an important skill to have, but nothing will increase your performance more than properly defined indexes.  If designed and used correctly, table indexes can eliminate major response times and drastically improve the speed of your entire reporting environment. 

What is an index?

Indexes are created on columns in either tables or views and provide the server with…

MEDITECH Connect introduces Park Place International. Park Place is committed to providing expert solutions for MEDITECH and the healthcare enterprise. Our dedicated team of professional engineers and consultants are MEDITECH specialists with long-standing track records of success in designing and implementing solutions for MEDITECH…

If up to 74% of physicians have or will be purchasing an iPad, why not more effort to make a truly functional iPad app for Meditech? I am using an EMR that is totally integrated with the iPad and would not have chosen an EMR that didn't. There must be many more with the same interest! 

Reference:  …

Many hospitals, clinics, and offices have been rushing out to implement an EMR to qualify for funding from the government through ARRA. Just because this is a requirement from the government does not mean it will be easy to convince everyone in your organization to use the new system. One objective of meaningful use is to ensure the system integrates and provides a…