SupportMed

Benefits and Goals of EMR for a Practice

2010-03-18T11:53:00.001-04:00

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) applications are clearly expensive. Early on these software companies would try and sell that the efficiency created from their software would allow you to see more patients offsetting the cost per provider. I have yet to see a confirmation of that benefit from a practice.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was designed with the understanding that EMR will not necessarily benefit your top line but may (over time) create soft cost savings for the provider and tremendous overall system savings nationally.

As we have seen from our customers, the benefits fall more on data integrity, accuracy of reporting and speed of pulling up patient records. Not to mention finally centralizing data and in some cases bringing more consistency to multi-physician workflow processes. When evaluating EMR be sure to:

1. Set realistic goals to judge success

2. Evaluate CCHIT apps

3. View a demo replicating how the software is currently working in your Specialty.

2010-03-08T12:14:00.001-05:00

Good article on the iPad coming out April 3. “iPad stoking doctor interest in tablet computers http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2010/02/22/bica0222.htm

2010-03-03T00:06:00.001-05:00

Pilot Project with Microsoft HealthVault and the Cleveland Clinic could improve chronic disease management. Connecting at-home medical devices, doctors and patients over the internet could create proactive healthcare. Read the release

2010-02-26T14:56:00.001-05:00

AT&T announced their commitment to enhancing patient care. Wonder how healthcare will respond to support showing up “sometime between 8-5”. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/att-expands-healthcare-community-online-to-improve-patient-care-85374332.html

Technology Tips for Medical Office Managers

2009-01-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

Most of our medical practice customers rely upon the office manager/practice administrator to be the point of contact for daily PC/Network issues. Practice Administrators tend to rely on an outside firm, like SupportNet, for all or most support. A couple of critical tips for the physician practice managers to understand:

Passwords: your practice will have many different passwords to different network components. Make sure you have them all documented and know who else knows the passwords. Your server(s) will have an administrator password, PC's will have an administrator password, firewall/router for the internet, and website (ftp) amongst others.
Anti-Virus: make sure all servers, PC's, laptops, TabletPC's, home PC's if connecting remotely - all have anti-virus software. Understand when it was installed, when it expires, how often the are updated (daily/weekly), and if they update through the server or straight from the internet.
Server: medical office managers need to understand some basics about your server such as - what are the specs of the server (RAM, Memory, etc), is it still under warranty, what applications run on the server, and is it physically in a clean/well ventilated area.
Backups: know what your backup routine is for server/PC data, how often they run (server should be daily), how are you ensuring some level of remote storage for your data either through remote online backups or taking a tape offsite, who is responsible for this action and how to periodically verify.
Wireless: as EMR continues to rollout the need for a secure wireless network is critical. Be sure your wireless network components are installed correctly with the latest encryption (like WEP) and the wireless router is periodically has a health check and updated as needed. If you are offering WiFi to guests/patients - strongly consider segmenting the network into two in order to protect your critical files from malicous browsing.

Obviously there is much more to the daily Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) and the medical networks get more complex with the size of the practice, but these are some pillars of the electronic world that need to be understood.

With any questions, feel free to contact us support@supportnetinc.net

Sharing Calendars in Outlook Web Access

2008-07-18T13:20:00.000-04:00

Many Office Manages and Practice Directors need shared access to Physician calendars, which is easily setup in Microsoft Exchange 2000 or later. But when working remotely and using Outlook Web Access (webmail version of Exchange) the feature is not as readily available as with Outlook on the PC.

One trick to resolve this is to log into your Outlook Web Access (OWA), the url string should look like: http://mail.practicedomain.com or something similar. Then to access Dr. Jones' calendar type in his/her username, forward-slash, calendar. For example, http://mail.practicedomain.com/drjones/calendar.

Assuming you already have rights to view this particular Physicians calendar within the office, this will pull up Dr. Jones' calendar. This feature only lets you see his/her calendar and will not provide the comparison calendar between multiple users, but at least give you a view.

Lack of Updated or Existing Anti-Virus Software

2008-06-18T10:58:00.000-04:00

Many physician practices run free versions of anti-virus software or none at all. Anti-virus is critical to maintaining the health of the network. Not only can a virus infiltrate the network, but also allows “back-doors” for a hacker to cause further damage. Everyone has heard the destructive stories of virus attacks dating back to the earliest publicity of the "I love you" virus, but not everyone is updating or even installing this software.

SupportNet recommends this preventative measure should be taken with one of the top three vendors: Trend Micro, Symantec or McAfee. Software licenses should be maintained as future malware will only be prevented with software updates. Purchasing longer lengthed license agreements - such as 2 or 3 years will decrease the per license cost.

SupportNet also provides hosted email scanning to all customers at no cost, to ensure email arrives to the servers in a healthy state. This is just an added layer in healthcare IT security.

Physicians - Make sure PM/EMR is being backed up

2008-06-11T20:24:00.000-04:00

Practice Management/Electronic Medical Record data is commonly not being backed up. On a number of occasions we have found that a practice is running a backup every evening, taking the tape off-site or to a safe – however there actually isn’t any data being backed up. There needs to be a verified recurring nightly backup and preferably one off-site backup procedure.

Simply having a backup run does not guarantee that you are backing up all or partial PM/EMR data. This is not a difficult procedure to confirm, but necessary as part of your daily tasks. Make sure to confirm the start/stop times of the data backup run, how much data was backed up and if there were any errors during the procedure. Keep an eye on your growing server data and always compare what really is on the server and what is being backed onto a tape. For example, if your Practice Management database is 1.25GB of data on the server then compare that to what the tape reads.

SupportNet views (daily) the resulting reports from the backup process and compares it to the server and the backup media. This is confirmed on a daily basis. We also setup backups to an off-site location and potentially a third backup onsite. Our team also practices the restore process of each customer’s backup data in case of emergency.

Wireless network vulnerabilities for Physician Practices

2008-06-03T09:17:00.000-04:00

Unsecure Wireless (Wi-Fi) networks that are not setup and configured optimally are one of the top IT liabilities for Physician Practices. Unless the practice is allowing guest accounts for – patients, visiting physicians, or vendors – there should be no broadcasting and promotion of the networks SSID (network name). There is no reason. Wi-Fi routers should be setup with WPA or better encryption. MAC addresses should be integrated into router tables and nobody else should know you have a wireless network.

SupportNet provides 24x7 monitoring of customer Wi-Fi networks. Our monitoring can identify outside threats and malicious attack attempts as well as abnormal internal activity such as larger than normal data traffic which could equate to unauthorized usage.

Backing up Physician Office PC's

2008-04-28T21:46:00.001-04:00

Backup, backup, backup - that's the name of the game. Your practice is nothing without good backups and SupportNet is seeing more and more physician offices that do not secure locally saved data on PC's.

With the growth of hosted Practice Management and EMR applications, practices are finding little need to install and maintain a server environment. The convenience is great. Users connect to practice software over the internet from any workstation available. This eliminates the costs associated with daily administration of a server and puts the server backup responsibility on the host company.

The byproduct of this topology is that practices are neglecting to backup other important files saved on the computers such as Microsoft Office, QuickBook or other applications. Since most Practice Managers or Directors don't share files with other office staff - because their responsibilities don't overlap - they don't need a central resource to share the files.

An easy and cost-effective solution to this is to install a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. SupportNet recommends a NAS server that can be RAID 5 configured for redundancy purposes. These devices can start at $800+ for 1 terabyte of storage and work off your current internal IP scheme (192.168.x.x). NAS servers do not run an operating system, thus eliminating the need to patch the OS, load anti-virus software or add/delete users.

After setting up the NAS, you can either map a drive from each PC to the device and save files directly to storage or create a script to backup locally saved files on a daily basis. Creating a script inherently creates some redundancy by maintaining files on both the PC and NAS.

Who is SupportNet, Inc.

2008-04-08T15:18:00.002-04:00

Founded in 2001 by John Goff, SupportNet, Inc. is a Columbus, Ohio-based healthcare IT solution provider offering hospitals, health systems, independent physician groups, hospital-based physicians and other healthcare entities with a wide range of skills and experience to help them thrive in a challenging, rapidly changing healthcare IT environment.

SupportNet's services are designed to shield healthcare organizations from the complexity of managing and supporting their own devices such as PC's, Laptops, Servers, PDA's and other network assets. We focus on creating customized solutions to meet our clients' specific challenge in: network management, mobile point of care, end-user support, data backup, web presence and technology procurement.