Message fromSenior Management

A Time To BeThankful For…MEDITECHMAGIC?John DanaheyVice President, Sales &Marketing

Patient Portals and BlueButton®: Hear from the

Experts

Leapfrog Group namestop hospitals for 2011

Benefits of BarcodeSpecimen Collection

Message from

Senior Management

A Time To Be Thankful For… MEDITECH MAGIC?John Danahey, Vice President of Sales & Marketing

This isn’t meant to be one of those holiday "It’s Time to Be Thankful" articles. It is actuallysomething that has been on my mind for quite a while. At a time when many pundits aredenigrating MEDITECH MAGIC and promoting the decision to either move to 6.0 or jump ship to

a new HIS, it might be appropriate to reconsider the value and virtues of sticking with MEDITECHMAGIC for the next few years. MEDITECH MAGIC sites have several reasons to be thankful – hereare just a few:

A handful of servers are able to run your entire MEDITECH HIS.Your IT staff has decades of collective experience with MEDITECH. Your end users havecenturies of collective experience. This intellectual capital is worth millions of dollars and youown it.Your peers across the country have implemented MEDITECH modules with great success.Yes! Even CPOE. You know this well – you have been achieving your own successes.MEDITECH MAGIC is certified for Meaningful Use. Hospitals with MEDITECH MAGIC havealready attested. You will too.Through years of dictionary development, customer defined screens, attributes and NPRreports, you have refined an HIS to meet the needs of your organization.MEDITECH has almost always allowed you to get the job done in order to advance patientcare. In the few areas it has fallen short, you have been able to supplement with integrated

care. In the few areas it has fallen short, you have been able to supplement with integrated3rd party solutions.

I am not suggesting that MAGIC is the best option for all organizations. There are very real reasonsto consider migrating to new platforms. At a time when healthcare costs are rising, hospitals arestruggling financially and health reform is in a speculative stage; maintaining and supplementing astable MEDITECH MAGIC platform may be a sound strategic decision.

For those that continue to embrace their MEDITECH MAGIC platform, I invite you to talk to usabout our continued commitment to solutions that can help you preserve this importantinvestment.

Patient Portals & Blue Button®: Hear from the ExpertsMake your mark and meet Meaningful UseConsumers are now demanding online access to their medical information. Hospitals areresponding by implementing patient portals. The Department of Veterans Affairs has answered thisrequest from veterans with Blue Button. Join us on January 17th for this HIMSS sponsored webinarto hear four experts discuss how Blue Button and patient portals improve the quality of healthcare,increase patient loyalty and help meet related Meaningful Use objectives.

In just one hour, including time for Q&A, you can:

Find out how patient portals with Blue Button boost patient loyalty and satisfactionLearn how Blue Button helps you meet patients' expectationsDiscover how patient portals and Blue Button support Meaningful Use objectives

January 17, 2012 Tuesday 2:00 pm ET

Mark your calendar and register now.

Meet Your Presenters:

Joshua J. Seidman, Ph.D.Director, Meaningful Use Office of the National Coordinatorfor Health Information Technology U.S. Department of Health &Human Services

James M. SperosSpecial Assistant to the Chief Technology Officer Office of the Secretary U.S. Department of VeteransAffairs

Kim M. Nazi, FACHE, Ph.D.CandidateManagement Analyst Veterans and Consumers HealthInformatics Office Veterans Health Administration U.S. Department of VeteransAffairs

Michelle Schneider, RNSenior Manager Clinical Product Development Iatric Systems, Inc.

For more information, please contact Amanda Howell at Amanda.Howell@iatric.comor 978-674-8121.

Leapfrog Group names top hospitals for 2011Sixty-five hospitals earned The Leapfrog Group’s annual “Top Hospital” designation for 2011. The“Top Hospital” designation recognizes hospitals that deliver the highest quality care by preventingmedical errors, reducing mortality for high-risk procedures like heart bypass surgery, and reducinghospital readmissions for patients being treated for conditions like pneumonia and heart attack.

The Leapfrog Hospital Survey provides a complete picture of a hospital’s quality and safety. The

The Leapfrog Hospital Survey provides a complete picture of a hospital’s quality and safety. Thesurvey focuses on three critical areas of hospital care: (1) how patients fare, (2) resources used tocare for patients, and (3) management practices that promote safety and quality. In each of thethree areas, Leapfrog asks hospitals to report on nationally standardized measures so healthcareconsumers can compare hospitals in their community and across the country.

Iatric Systems recognizes our customers who made this prestigious list:

Anne Arundel Medical Center (MD)CHOC Children's (CA)Miles Memorial Hospital (ME)University of Maryland Medical Center (MD)The Valley Hospital of Ridgewood (NJ)

Visit the Leapfrog site to view the complete list.

Benefits of Barcode Specimen CollectionBarcode specimen collection improves patient safety and provides many additional benefits, suchas decreased stat result turnaround times, increased physician satisfaction and much more.

MobiLab offers barcode specimen collection for phlebotomists and nursing staff, too. If you receivemislabeled specimens collected by nurses in the ED or other patient care areas, MobiLab can help.Join us for one of the following webcast demonstrations to see how. Just select a date and followthe instructions to register:

Date Day Time

January 11, 2012 Wednesday 2:00 pm ET

January 12, 2012 Thursday 2:00 pm ET

For more information on these webinars, please contact Amanda Howell atAmanda.Howell@iatric.com or 978-674-8121.

We look forward to seeing you online in January!

Revenue Cycle Improvement TipsKay Jackson, Manager, Software Certification, Compliance and Financial

What are Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs)?

An ACO is a Medicare type of payment and delivery model; participation in an ACO by a provider isvoluntary. Care delivery in the United States as we know it will change radically in the next fewyears. Care coordination between all providers as well as the payors is the cornerstone of ACOs.Medicare offers several types of ACO programs. I think that the three core principles for all ACOswill be:

Patient-centered care, where providers of care collectively are accountable for quality of carefor a population of patientsPayments for services rendered are linked to quality of care and ability to reduce overall costsNecessity of modern IT infrastructure to share information

There is a definite link between ACO and Meaningful Use. I read that ACO and Meaningful Use are

escalators going to the same destination. Almost two-thirds of ACOs identified were started byhospitals or hospital systems. Will this new model work? Only time will tell, but hospitals that aremaking changes in IT integration and interoperability now will benefit all patients, not justMedicare patients.

Next month: Why are hospitals considering ACO’s?

Resources:

CMS: https://www.cms.gov/ACO/From Healthcare Finance News-10 things to know about ACOs:http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/10-things-know-about-acosACO final rule: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-11-02/pdf/2011-27461.pdf

NPR Report Writing TipsJoe Cocuzzo, Vice President – NPR Services

NPR Tip: Make “Program Call” macros rename automatically (MAGIC andClient/Server)

You may know that you can make a macro in a report that can be called as a program, rather thanused as a block of code that is incorporated into your main report logic based on a keyword in afootnote. This has certain advantages, but if you make a copy of your report and fail to track downand change the program calls, your new report will still call the macros from the original.

In this month’s tip, we will show how you can add some code to a “start” macro of your report thatwill use the name of the new page program to make sure that you always call the “program macros”of the current report, without needing to track down and edit the program calls every time youmake a copy.

The big advantage of making your macro a program is that it is completely separate code withseparate variables. Two big advantages: you do not need to re-translate your report after changingthe macro and you can change the value of subscripts in the macro without worrying that you willaffect the behavior of the report by possibly changing the value of a subscript the report is loopingon.

A typical use of a macro as a program would be to create a download file:(C/S Version shown, for MAGIC just omit the PFF NO footnote).

The two macros look like this (MAGIC versions):

The difference for Client/Server (C/S) is that you cannot send a tab character to the printer withoutsurrounding it with some extra codes so that it can sneak by the print manager:

Important Note: If you do not do any output in the picture, you will get a “no records found”message at the end of the report, and if your export is large, the report will run slowly. To fix thisfor both MAGIC and C/S, add a call the @.line in your “detail” macro. We don’t need to do this inthis example report because we have an HR and D region in our picture, so the report will call@.line per record for us.

Now (finally), onto the tip. When you call a macro with a keyword like this: AL D your.macro.name,if you make a copy, the new version of the report uses “its own” macro. If you call it as a program(start with %, pass arguments in ()) like this AL D %ABS.PAT.zcus.is.your.report.M.macro(A),unless you change the call in the copy, you will call the macro of the original report. It is easy tomiss this if you call your macro from a line attribute or computed field.

Fortunately, the report keeps its own name in a slash variable called @.new.page.pgm (translates to/R.NEW.PAGE.PGM). For MAGIC, the value stored is the name of the report with a “.R” at the end.In C/S, the value stored is the internal name of the macro, including the prefix. If we write a startmacro that uses the data stored in @.new.page.program to build the program names from thereport name in @.new.page.pgm, we can be sure that any copy of our report will call its ownmacros, with no hand-editing necessary.

For MAGIC, we can attach a start macro that creates two program names in two variables, usingthe @.new.page.pgm value, then modify the footnote to call the programs using those variables:

Then we modify our footnotes to call the start macro and to call the programs using the HEADERand DETAIL variables we set up in the start macro.

The C/S code is just slightly different, as we have to cope with the fact that the @.new.page.pgm

holds the translated name of the program. If you use the “List Object Code” option in ProcessReports, you can see what these look like:

So, our start macro has to use some extra dots, and in the footnote, we call the program fromwithin square brackets with no % sign on the outside:

We put two dots between the M and the macro name:

And we call the macros like this [MACRO](0)

C/S and MAGIC versions of this example report ABS.PAT.zcus.is.eupdate.local.macro has beenuploaded to our report library. http://www.iatric.com/Information/NPRReportLibrarySearch.aspx

You can find additional NPR Tips on our website athttp://www.iatric.com/Information/NPRTips.aspx, as well as information about our on-site NPRReport Writer Training and NPR Report Writing Services.

Read Joe's blog posts at MEDI-Talk.

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Upcoming Events:

HITSE at Night: Dinner & Discussion with Dr. HalamkaJanuary 24, 2012Top of the Hub (Prudential Building)(Boston, MA)

WHAAS 2012 - Western Healthcare Alliance Annual SummitFebruary 9, 2012DoubleTree Hotel(Grand Junction, CO)

HIMSS 2012 Annual Conference & ExhibitionFebruary 20 - 24, 2012Venetian Sands Expo Center(Las Vegas, NV)

2012 International MUSE ConferenceMay 29 - June 1, 2012Disney's Coronado Springs Resort(Orlando, FL)

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