Filed under: IT Services
Are you hesitating to buy that expensive heavy weight software product that has to be hosted and maintained on your own servers to consume its services, but the services provided by that product are critical to run your business effectively? If your answer is “Yes”, there is good news, it’s called Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS is also well known as On-Demand software and ASP (Application Service Provider) hosted software with some exceptions. SaaS model of offering Software product services to the customer domain is very cost-effective for the software product vendors and thus, they can offer these services at very competitive and lower costs to the customers. Customers can access all the services they need to run their business smoothly SaaS model with a comparable level of reliability, scalability and performance as compared to actual product licensed and hosted out of their own servers. This model based software products and services are especially a boon for small and medium size businesses that require various business critical software products that are simply out of their budget range to purchase license, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is as important as it is for big enterprises to the small and medium size businesses to compete in this global market, but it might not be feasible to purchase a full-fledge CRM product license and even if they managed to justify license costs, lot of times, the support and maintenance is just too expensive.
SaaS is a very cost-effective model that is still evolving in healthcare domain. Especially due to the nature of healthcare/medical products that has to meet FDA/ PHI/ HIPAA/ Security/ High Availability/ Stability type of regulations, policies and requirements, it becomes challenging to offer software product services using SaaS model to the customers. But good news is, healthcare product vendors can leverage recent changes that occurred in the recent decade in terms of federal regulations that streamlined healthcare IT/electronic infrastructure to be in compliance with a set of standards and guidelines for offering their software products as Software as a Service to customers without having to worrying too much about compatibility of their product services with the customers infrastructure. For instance, a product vendor might be able to offer some type of insurance claim validator as SaaS to make sure all the claims being submitted by a healthcare provider to the payers/insurance companies are valid and well formed, knowing that providers are federally required to transmit all of their electronic claims in X12 format to Insurance companies. So, there are lots of opportunities that we can continue exploiting on in healthcare domain to make quality healthcare cost-effective and affordable.
If you need more information on this topic, please feel free to email me at venkat.madip@sidglobal.net or post your questions or comments here.
Filed under: Healthcare IT
As a healthcare provider running a group/single physician medical practice, how do you make sure you are running your practice to be competent and meet the 21st century healthcare demands and expectations in this down turn economy? Well, for any healthcare/medical organization in this era, the name of the game is HIS systems. HIS is the cost-effective solution that supports like a backbone, to help provide services in this competitive and demanding world. HIS can be compared to an ERP in many ways, as much as an ERP is essential to manage your Financials, Human Resources, Sales, Marketing etc in today’s world, HIS systems are important for a healthcare provider to manage patient records, patient registration, insurance and billing, patient access, images, prescriptions, inventory etc. In short, an HIS system is a solution to create and manage Electronic Medical Records (EMR) of the patients that encapsulates all the required information.
What is an EMR? An EMR is a record that is composed of Electronic Health Records (EHR) of the patients and other administrative and financial information like appointment schedules, billing details etc.
There are primarily two types of HIS systems.
- HIS for Hospitals
- HIS for Clinics (Group or Single Physician Practices) – They are also called Medical Practice Management Systems
There are comprehensive and matured HIS solutions that support large enterprise multi-chain hospitals of varying sizes right now. But, there are hardly any reliable, proven and comprehensive HIS solutions for Clinics and small/mid size healthcare organizations.
Ok, enough of technology talks, this should have given you decent idea of HIS. To explain the HIS and EMR in detail, it’s going to take a whole big article for itself. So, let’s go straight to our primary question “What’s in it for me as a healthcare provider?”.
Ok, let’s start at the pain points or actual issues that you face in today’s world, while trying to provide quality health services.
- You practice out of multiple clinics, it’s a good way to reach out and provide your services to broader communities, but ever experienced trouble sharing patient records across these clinics. Sounds like a very familiar issue that you experience? Yes, it’s a big issue today for the practices with multiple clinics, especially when patients schedule their appointments across these multiple clinics randomly due to the convenience, doctor’s availability, patient’s schedule etc.
- You are a busy healthcare provider and you are having issues managing your time efficiently? Are you over-booked or under-booked significant amount of hours a week? Again, this is one of the most common issues, today’s medical practitioners are facing.
- You are a dedicated and quality healthcare provider and you want to provide best medical services possible for your patients at lower costs? But, you are not able to make enough justice to your patients and your profession because of bulky, unorganized health records of the patients charted and filed using paper based systems? You feel, it takes forever to find the patient health history/information while browsing through all that paper work in the patient’s file? Have you ever experienced the issue of not being able to get to the critical healthcare information of your patients on-time, the information that is hidden deep in that bulky paper work filed in the patient’s files? Studies show that, this is a common and high patient risk issue which needs to be addressed for better quality and legal issues.
- Malpractice issues
- HIPAA compliancy issues
Following are some of the many reasons why you need this type of solution. These are the answers for what’s it in me question. These are the solutions for the above listed issues that you face on daily basis.
- Ability to access patient records across multiple clinics of your practice. This will help you access patient records from any location. It doesn’t matter where you are, working out of one of your clinics, on-call at home or at a friend’s place; the records are at your fingertips for you to access in a secured environment.
- Scheduling process becomes easier and efficient by using HIS systems. You can plan your time in advance and record your plans (e.g. your weekly availability fluctuations, vacations, holidays, extra available time etc) so that registration clerk can schedule patients to efficiently utilize your time. Your practice will have better control on patient cancellations, delays, no-showups etc for more effective utilization of your time. This also gives ability to manage your schedule from any location and time.
- Ability to quickly review patient’s critical health records like allergies, medication, major health issues; a patient dashboard for quick and comprehensive snapshot of patient’s health. This feature really helps you by emphasizing some of this critical patient information during the treatment and thereby cutting down length of your sessions with each patient.
- Many malpractice issues can be avoided using HIS systems as they will help you make sure to follow all the approved clinical workflows and record all the events and data during the process.
- HIS systems keep your practice or healthcare organization compliant with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Protected Health Information (PHI).
Right HIS solution should help you operate more efficiently and effectively which translates into 20% to 40% increase in revenues through cost savings and being able to handle higher patient volume.
As explained in this article, it’s most important for medical practices to adopt a suitable HIS solution to provide cost-effective quality services in this era. If you need more information on this topic, please feel free to email me at venkat.madip@sidglobal.net or post your questions or comments here.
Author: Venkat Madipadaga, Chief Architect – SIDGS
“Thick clients are tough to maintain/deploy” is just a myth anymore in various perspectives, especially for java apps, ofcourse with some exceptions. With the introduction of Java webstart, it has become much easier to deploy and manage thick clients. This solution brings good from both worlds, web UI & thick client. Using this technology, you can deploy your thick client application in a centralized location (server) and access the application to serve HTTP/TCP requests from your workstation as if it’s a web app (atleast from the end-user perspective, there is lot of technical things that go under-covers to make that happen, which would be out of scope for this discussion). So, basically to visualize it better, you click a url link to the application from a web page as if you are launching a web page but launch the thick client instead, with all those rich UI features that come with workstation based clients. I recommend this solution for any application that need to meet following combination of requirements:
1. Access local workstation resources (e.g. Serial ports, RFID readers, USB ports, Local file system etc.)
2. Need quick UI response
3. Need easy deployment, upgrade and maintenance of application from a centralized location without needing to install on each and every end-user workstations/computers (e.g. application hosted by IIS on Windows server)
4. Need rich UI look & Feel
5. Need to server both HTTP and/or TCP requests
6. Need the reliability of thick client application
7. Need to work off-line
Note 1: Even though this technology is designed for Java applications, it can be used for non-java applications with some intelligent design.
Note 2: This technology currently have some limitations like, being able to handle dynamic data as an input to launch your application, but again with some intelligent design, we can over come most of the deficiencies Webstart possess.
Filed under: Security
Author: Venkat Madipadaga, Chief Architect – SIDGS
It’s already that time where we are getting close to see another version of Windows operating system. It feels like we got there pretty soon this time, as many organizations are still at XP and some using Vista, some more in the process of migration to Vista accross the enterprise or small groups within the enterprise for various reasons. So, as always it’s going to be a challenge for the organizations to migrate to Win 7 from whatever Win release they are on currently. But, it’s even bigger challenge for the entities who are dealing with IT security. Some of them would be IT enterprise security groups within the organizations, secuirty & anti-virus software vendors etc. Most of the security software vendors collaborate with Microsoft during development of Win 7 to design their security products to be suitable for the new variations and features of the OS. In security software’s perspective most concerend areas with this new release of OS are Networking features, Caching mechanisms, Internet Browsers, Kernel & Registry. This translates to various efforts for enterprises that use Win 7 & software vendors that create security products. For organizations who use Win 7, it means new/modfied/enhanced security policies, and for security product vendors, it is significant changes/updates/enhancements to the security products (e.g. anti-virus) and lotz and lotz of teting testing & testing (Q & Q).
