A discussion with my coworkers recently reminded me of the wide variability in the size and nature of the organizations that utilize our software products. Behavioral Health organizations range from solo, part-time psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and professional counselors in private practice to large community-based organizations that provide inpatient, outpatient, intensive outpatient, and home-based care to [...]
In the past year, the Office for Civil Rights, the federal office responsible for enforcing HIPAA privacy requirements, has finalized the rule by which all covered entities and their business associates are required to protect the personal and health information of patients they serve. The rule details the actions a breach of the privacy rule [...]
I have spent much of the past week getting ready to use and then implementing a new computer. I have been reminded of a few things as I have gone through this process and thought I would share them with you just in case you are getting ready to go to a new machine any [...]
Last week I attended a webinar sponsored by The National Council: Healthcare Reform Expands Compliance Requirements: Prepare Now. There is a recording of the presentation at the link above. I attend lots of webinars to try to stay informed about what is happening in our industry. As indicated by the fact that I often write [...]
This week one of our customers experienced a “happy ending” to a very unhappy story. We thought we would share it with you. They were sure they had a good backup. When their server hard drive crashed, they were distressed but not terrified. Instead of dealing with the loss of all their data, it merely meant [...]
Almost two months passed between my post last week and the last one before that. The combination of family illnesses followed by vacation and recovery from travel put me in a position of being so far behind in the reading I usually do that I could not possibly catch up. My personal inclination was to [...]
I spent the last week spinning my wheels. That is not entirely true, but it did feel that way. You see, we decided that we should switch our email server from the Microsoft Exchange server Seth was having to take time to maintain to Google’s business mail system. It appears that we will be able to [...]
Last week I attended a webinar hosted by Healthcare Informatics about the transition to ICD-10. The webinar was sponsored by Cognizant Technology Solutions and was presented by Janice W. Young from Health Industry Insights and David Hamilton of the Healthcare & Life Science Practice at Cognizant. I am fond of the webinars hosted by Healthcare Informatics. They allow [...]
Sometimes I am doing so many things at one time that I lose track of where I am and need to stop and scan my environment for clues to what I was last doing. Because each of us at SOS wears so many hats, most of us multitask every day. We have found a simple [...]
I checked my email on Sunday night to find two new requests for “friend” status on my Facebook page…one was from a customer, the other was from my mother-in-law. The juxtaposition of requests brought directly home the conflict and confusion that some folks are having about use of the social media sites. Is your use [...]
A question on one of the psychology listservs I follow got me thinking, yet again, about data security…and backup. The writer asked about the proper procedures to follow when patient psychotherapy treatment records are permanently lost. The question pertained to how the counselor in question should respond to the loss of all of their patient [...]
We invite your comments on this and all of our blog entries. To participate in the conversation, click on the title of this article and enter your thoughts in the box at the bottom of the page. We spent the holiday weekend at the Georgia Tandem Rally, our favorite organized bicycling event. This year, 102 [...]
Have you had your credit card stolen? Or maybe new checks were taken from your mailbox after they were delivered to your home. Perhaps you received a call from a zealous credit card company asking about suspicious charges on one of your credit card accounts. If you have had this happen, you well know that [...]
Last week I started writing an article about my attendance at the Software and Technology Vendor Association (SATVA) meeting. That quickly went by the wayside as my time was gobbled up by the crucial task of restoring my laptop computer to a usable state. On my return from New Orleans at the end of March, it [...]
This week’s entry is a guest article by Dr. Vince Bellwoar, a psychologist user of our software whose practice is located in Pennsylvania. Vince posted a question on our SOS user group about how other users measure quality of care. This spurred significant discussion on that group. I am hopeful that it will also stir up [...]
Standard advice for securing computer systems is to require users to change passwords frequently. Something about this recommendation has always bothered me, but I never really thought it through. A current blog posting at Healthcare Informatics by Dale Sanders really hits the nail on the head. He points out that these change-passwords-frequently policies actually undercut password security [...]
I have been struggling this week with getting a blog article written. Too many items keep coming across my desk that distract me from the task. I had a topic I was all set to write about; I even started jotting some notes. Then something else interrupted me. As I have gotten older and have [...]
I have been thinking a great deal lately about the current financial crisis and how it is affecting our customers and their clients/patients/consumers. Every day, the top news stories are about some aspect of this recession. American Psychological Association (APA) reports in the Monitor on Psychology article Money is the top stressor for Americans that money and [...]
Last month I wrote an article about movement toward Electronic Health Records (EHR) in the behavioral health community. I was stunned by your silence on the issue. So much of my energy for the past two years has been focused on EHRs, their use in general medicine and in mental health, that I was very [...]
We were recently told by the IT person for an organization that had six weeks earlier lost all their data, that backing up was not a priority. Yes, they were having the same problem again. No, they did not have a good backup. They had needed to get up and running again and that took [...]
