HIPAA/HiTech Compliance Seminar

SSGI will be presenting a HIPAA/HiTech Compliance Seminar at the Northwest Connecticut Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, April 27th from 8:30am to 10:00am. The seminar will help healthcare providers understand the changes in the HIPAA rules that the HiTech Act has introduced.

During the seminar SSGI will announce a partnership with eGestalt to provide web based HIPAA compliance assessements. These assessments will help healthcare providers determine their current compliance status and help them become and stay compliant.

For more information conact the Chamber of Commerce office at 860-496-8684 or SSGI at 800-897-7002.

Office 2010 Ribbon Bar to Menu Pull Down Help

We have been converting many of our Clients to Microsoft Office 2010 from various older versions of Office.  Overall, everything is going well.  However, for some Clients the Ribbon Bar, introduced in Office 2007, is causing some problems.  Even though the design of the Ribbon Bar is supposed to make finding all the the various Office functions easier, it can actually be more difficult for those that have already created a mental path to finding those functions in the old menu pull downs.  This appears to be a common problem.  To address the issue, Microsoft has created several tools to help users make the change.  You can find them here.

I have found that the Ribbon Bar is actually easier to use, but I do find that sometimes I just can’t find something that I used to be able to locate pretty quickly.  By using these tools and a little replication I can get my brain to accept the change.

Medi-Span Update Distribution Changes

Wolters Kluwer, the company that owns Medi-Span, is making changes to the way it distributes the quarterly drug database updates.  After June 30th 2011 they will no longer ship the updates via CD.  Instead, they will publish the updates to a website to be downloaded.  This means there will be one more CD update covering 2Q11.  After that customers will need to download the updates from the website.

This affects our Allscripts Clients.  We have partnered with Wolters Kluwer to take care of the whole process for our Clients.  We will create the necessary website account and set up the process.  For those Clients that we manage the Medi-Span updates, we will download and install them when they are released.  We will be notified by Wolters Kluwer when updates are released.  At that point we will download the updates and schedule an after hours installation.

In order for Allscripts Clients to be able to utilize the downloadable updates Allscripts must be at version 7.0.1.36 or higher. Clients that wish to have us take care of the registration process can simply contact our office.

Internet Explorer 9 Released

The latest version of Internet Explorer was released on 3/14/11.  Version 9 is more secure, faster and sports an updated user interface.  On the technical side, it supports HTML5 very well.  The new user interface is much slimmer than previous versions allowing for more viewing area.  It takes advantage of hardware acceleration which allows for a very fast browsing experience.  Expect some pretty neat stuff when web developers start taking advantage of IE9’s display capabilities.  The address and search bar are now combined in the One Box.  It takes a little getting used to, but quickly feels like the right way to work. 

IE9 is tightly integrated with Windows 7.  It also runs in Windows Vista but not Windows XP.  Websites can be pinned to the taskbar and/or start menu in Windows 7.  IE9 also allows users to protect themselves from marketing tracking that occurs on many if not most websites.  You can manually block tracking on specific websites or utilize predefined lists that are provided by several Microsoft partners. 

IE9 is much more standards compliant than previous versions of IE.  While not perfect, it really does work much better on more sites than in the past.  It’s adherence to HTML5 specs will insure that this is true moving forward as well.

I have been using IE9 for about 8 months.  Other than the typical “beta issues” that comes with running beta software, it has been pretty good.  By the time the Release Candidate was available, IE9 was pretty solid.   Now that the final product has been released, it’s certainly worthy of replacing your existing browser.  As with all new software, we do suggest taking some time to test IE9 in your specific environment to insure that your critical websites work properly before you roll it out to your devices.  It’s a solid product.  It will make browsing the internet safer, faster and much more enjoyable.

What is YOUR Time Worth?

It seems like we go through phases when Clients or prospects begin asking whether they can do some of their own network support.  Of course this really starts coming up more often when the economy is in a poor condition.  We always try to get our Clients to take on some of the basic day to day support tasks.  For instance, why pay us to replace a mouse or keyboard.  In some cases, if the Client has a little more technical expertise we will help them take on higher level tasks.  However, when it comes to items they may affect the security or reliability of their network, we draw the line.

Most often these requests are based on perceived costs.  “If I do the task myself I don’t have to pay you and therefore I save money.”  In the case of lower level tasks that may be true.  However, in higher level tasks it may not only be untrue but can also be disastrous.

First, let’s think about pure cost.  Over the years I have had doctors, lawyers, business owners and other high level people attempt to do their own network support.  Let’s say that an IT Pro charges $100.00 per hour.  A problem occurs on the network.  The doctor, lawyer, business owner does his/her own troubleshooting and tries to resolve the issue his or herself.  Let’s even say they get things going.  Perhaps it took several hours, maybe a day, maybe more.  So we saved the cost of the IT person, right?  Probably not.  Consider this.  How much is the value of that doctor’s, lawyer’s, etc time?  In most cases, the value of that persons time far exceeds the $100.00 that the IT Pro would have charged.  Beyond that, how much faster would the IT Pro have solved the problem?  If we just estimate half the time, how much is that in downtime cost to the organization?  Do you know how much it costs your organization for every hour of downtime?

Another perhaps even more serious consideration is even if the network is up and running again, what might you have missed?  Perhaps the hard drive is failing and simply turning the server off and on cleared the immediate problem.  Everyone goes back to work and after a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks it goes down again.  This time this system will not come up and after more time is spent trying to fix the problem you call in an IT Pro.  What he or she finds is that not only is the hard drive now completely dead, the backup has not been running since the original issue.  What is the cost of all that lost work?

While it is true that Clients have the capability to fix simple IT related problems, in most cases the perceived cost savings by trying to handle more involved IT issues is simply not there.  And in some cases the results can be disastrous.