Spring has finally arrived in central Florida. It has become warm enough not to need to wear cool weather clothing but cool enough to keep windows and doors open for most of the day. This is the time of year when I want to be outdoors even though the air is full of pollens. I experience a [...]
During the past two weeks, I have spent several hours creating process diagrams or flow charts for a customer. After using our billing software and a custom attendance/reporting module we created for them in 2003 but maintaining paper clinical records, they are now implementing a custom Forms module and preparing to implement our behavioral health electronic [...]
I try to keep informed about Electronic Medical records (EMRs), certification of those products, and funding for them provided through the economic stimulus bill (ARRA). After all, as a developer and vendor of a behavioral health EMR, I really should know some of this stuff. This week, I was struck by the number of acronyms that have come into common [...]
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 [...]
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) contains provisions for spending approximately $19 billion in health IT infrastructure and Medicare and Medicaid incentives to press providers to use health IT, according the NJAMHA Newswire , a publication of the NJ Association of Mental Health Associations. The National eHealth Collaborative, the replacement for AHIC (the [...]
