What do CSI: Miami, ACR Supply and Pro Chem, Inc. have in common?  They are all businesses who recently decided to leverage enterprise computing services here at Matrix.  What is Matrix delivering to these new-comers?  Let’s take a closer look:

Pro Chem of Alpharetta, Georgia (www.procheminc.com) manufactures and distributes a wide variety of environmentally sound chemical products.  While still considered a “small business”, the owners of Pro Chem recognized that to be truly world-class in their approach to international markets, they needed to leverage enterprise-grade information technology tools and infrastructure in order to elevate the availability and reliability of their applications and data.  Matrix is delivering this world-class computing environment.

ACR Supply of Raleigh, North Carolina (www.acrsupply.com) distrubutes HVAC and refrigeration components and supplies from 10 locations across North Carolina.  Part of their very aggressive growth plan looking out over the next 5 years includes use of Matrix infrastructure to deliver their applications and data uniformly to a wide variety of devices and user skill levels.  Using the DataServe virtual environment, ACR users can securely access their systems via any Internet connection using just about any workstation, tablet, iPad or Smartphone device.

CSI: Miami (www.miami-csi.com) is, well, I’m sure you have heard of the wildly successful CSI television shows.  CSI has tapped Matrix for special IT security needs.  That’s all I can say about that.

Tom Colton is Vice President of Business Development at Matrix.  He can be reached at 803-978-2051 or Tom.Colton@Matrix-IBS.com

TUG • U2U is the annual conference for licensed users of Infor Distribution Software products. Over 150 sessions of technical, managerial and executive content over three days along with a marketplace of third party solution providers make this THE distribution event to attend this year.  More…

Doctors can track patient location from admission to discharge, access and share daily schedules and calendars, order labs, refill prescriptions, and more.

An April 2010 New York Times article, Doctors and Patients, Lost in Paperwork, says that an average physician spends as much time doing paperwork as he or she does with the patient.

“Paperwork, or documentation, takes up as much as a third of a physician’s workday; and for many practicing doctors, these administrative tasks have become increasingly intolerable, a source of deteriorating professional morale,” the article states.

The solution: a paperless practice, which isn’t a new phenomenon in healthcare. And there may be no better time to go paperless, given the current government push toward electronic medical records (EMRs). EMRs can help you document patient records electronically, and also makes communications much more efficient by allowing you to share patient records and send prescriptions with a single click.

The key is to select an EMR that helps, not hampers, productivity. A solution that forces you to spend the same amount of time as you would with a paper-based record is hardly an effective solution.

Consider gloEMR, one of the very first EMRs to be Stimulus certified through the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT).Through the dashboard that is the heart of gloEMR, doctors can track patient location from admission to discharge, access and share daily schedules and calendars, order labs, refill prescriptions, and more.

gloEMR is also unique in that it leverages several key Microsoft products, including Microsoft Office Word for text editing. Microsoft technology makes it easy to create practice-specific templates for routine encounters without expensive programming or training—which means your EMR improves productivity.

Contact us for more information.

With the growth of social networking, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate business connections with personal connections.

November 17, 2010 was declared by Jimmy Kimmel during his television show as “National Unfriend Day”, the opportunity for all Facebook users to declutter their Facebook pages by “unfriending” people in their friends’ lists. He claims that Facebook has been “cheapening” the idea of friendship. To many the idea was hilarious, but others are seriously considering the wisdom of unfriending.

Is Kimmel on to something here? Can unfriending benefit your online business?

Research shows that as social media gets bigger, we’re getting smaller. Brian Wong, a network marketer says it simply: “With the growth of social networking, I am finding it increasingly difficult to separate business connections and personal connections.” He says that having almost 1,000 friends on Facebook has made it difficult for him to see the feeds and updates of his “real” friends and important business partners.

Lately there is a growing trend of de-scaling on the internet. People have started “pruning” their social lives online. For example, the popular Farmville app lost 30 million players this year, and people are beginning to realize that conversations and comments are more important than a huge number of blog hits.

So how can de-scaling and unfriending help your business? The drive to be more intimate can benefit your business by allowing you to form a tighter circle of customers, more successfully establishing you as a preferred channel for consumption.

Luckily, there are tools that can help you descale your social networks:

1. Path – Offers small-scale communities where people feel more comfortable sharing personal information. It controls who can view your information and does not include features that make your content viral.
2. Letter.ly – A subscription-based newsletter for bloggers who feel that public posts decrease the quality of conversations. This newsletter opens discussion only to people who pay, or who are privately invited to read a blog post.
3. GroupMe – A texting app which limits your group text participants to only 14, to ensure that meaningful dialogues take place.

What about the flip side of unfriending and descaling? While you’re considering who to eliminate from your social circles, your contacts are likely doing the same. Here are some tips to help you make their cuts:

1.       Be selective in your communications.
Of course, your product is important – to you. But not every little detail is as important to your audience. Be sure to focus on key features and benefits from your audience’s perspective.

2.       Stay on topic.
Always give relevant communications to your customers, and never rant or badmouth competitors. This is a sure way to lose customers.

3.       Provide value.
In addition to talking about your product or service, find ways to provide value to your circle of friends. Understand topics and pain points important to them, and provide valuable information and advice to help them succeed. You’ll soon come to be considered as a valuable resource to your contacts – one that they want to keep in their online social groups.

One thing is clear: quality is still more important than quantity, especially in the current economic downturn when people are downsizing everything. Start “pruning” your social network – and take steps to avoid being pruned – and you’ll reap the benefits of having a tight circle of loyal friends and customers.

Using shared Wi-Fi networks can be really convenient, but it is not without risks of its own.

These days, more and more people are on the go, and many of them bring their work with them. And in this day and age, it’s ideal if you’re working – or playing for that matter – while connected to the internet, which is often through public Wi-Fi hotspots.

While connecting to public and open-access Wi-Fi hotspots is indeed convenient, using open networks also poses risks that endanger your security. The open nature that allows anyone to use the connection also enables unscrupulous people to gain access to your private information. The whole act of stealing information from people who are using public Wi-Fi networks is called ‘sidejacking’.

There are applications such as Firesheep, for example, that provide an easy-to-use platform that others can exploit to spy and harvest personal, sensitive information from you. And since Firesheep is a Mozilla Firefox plug in, virtually anyone can download and use it to sidejack people on the same network.

You can’t be too cautious with your personal and business data these days, so you always need to have the proper laptop configuration and security infrastructure to protect your system, especially when you frequently avail of open and public networks. To know more about this, please feel free to give us a call and we’ll be happy to draw up some security options that meet your specific needs.

gloEHR offers five key features of tomorrow’s EMR:  interoperability, scalability, easy maintenance, a user-friendly interface, and the potential for mobile computing.

As more and more EMRs come onto the market, it’s becoming more difficult to choose one that will remain usable well into the future. According to one IT consulting firm, health care providers should look for five key components.

Three factors are essential in an EMR, and are quickly becoming the standard:

• Interoperability. gloEMR is the only EMR with Microsoft Office built right in—which makes sharing data simple.
• Scalability. Microsoft technology in gloEMR makes it easy to create practice-specific templates for routine encounters without expensive programming.
• Easy maintenance. The familiarity of Microsoft technology in gloEMR reduces implementation time and ongoing maintenance.

Two additional factors will distinguish tomorrow’s EMR from the rest:

• User-friendly design and interface. gloEMR offers user-friendly dashboard—so one click is all it takes to find, view, and work with the most critical patient information.
• The potential for mobile computing. gloStream is committed to meeting the ongoing needs of its customers—now and in the future.

Does your EMR have those features? gloEMR does. And now getting goEMR is easier. gloStream recently announced the “glo For It!” EMR replacement program. Under the program, any practice that upgrades to gloEMR from a competitive EMR will receive a gloPM practice management license, a $7,500 value, for free.

gloPM, the latest addition to the gloStream suite of products, is a powerful and easy to learn and use practice management system. It simplifies scheduling, billing, and report creation—all with Microsoft technology.

Related articles: Five key features of tomorrow’s EHR

It looks as if we’ll soon know the names of the authorized testing and certification bodies (ATCBs) for electronic health records (EHRs). ATCBs will be the only authorities that can certify EHR products for meaningful use (and thus allow health care providers to earn American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, incentives).

According to the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology, officials are reviewing applications and will likely announce approved ATCBs before the end of the summer.

Although the ONC has not announced the names of ATBC applications, Drummond Group, an interoperability testing company, and Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), a nonprofit, have announced their applications.

After ATCBs are approved, they will attend a training session in Washington, DC, to learn how to certify EHRs in a manner that is consistent with the testing criterion supplied by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. After that, the ATCBs will be open to business at their own discretion—which is a good thing, given that health care providers can start collecting data on January 1.

Ultimately, the ONC plans to launch a web site that will contain a list of ATCB-certified products, called the Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL).

Government incentives will only offset electronic health record (EHR) costs by about 15% to 20%, according to McKinsey & Company—which means health care providers should be prepared to make a significant investment as part of a “radical new approach to IT.”

According to their study published in management consulting firm McKinsey & Company’s business journal McKinsey Quarterly, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) money will not come close to covering the expenses of an EHR.

“This should not be a news flash,” wrote Paul Roemer on the Healthcare IT Strategy blog.

The question is: what should a health care provider do?

Although the McKinsey & Company study focuses on hospitals, its advice can be applied to physician offices as well. According to the study, three factors will distinguish the best EHR implementations: governance with real authority, radical simplification of architecture, and methodical planning and execution. Also according to the study, health care providers who keep these factors in mind “will be well positioned not only to meet their compliance responsibilities but also to lower their operating costs significantly while improving the quality of patient care.”

Roemer takes that advice a step further, suggesting that health care providers approach EHR implementation purely from a business perspective, asking how it will help them be more efficient and effective.

“If your EHR can help you do these two things, you will meet other goals, goals like providing better care, reducing the number of errors, saving time, and eliminating processes that add no value,” he writes. “Therein lays the all-too-elusive ROI.”

“It is worth a phone call to your EHR vendor,” he adds.

Related articles

• Expert: Providers must make IT investments on their own, have new implementation strategies

• Reforming hospitals with IT investment

• Will the ARRA money be worth the effort?

Physicians can sign up for the EHR incentive program in January 2011. To begin receiving payments, they must have demonstrated meaningful use of certified Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for 90 days—which means the first incentive payments will likely go out in May 2011.

Now that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released its final rule on meaningful use, the agency is preparing the systems that will trigger incentive payments—which physicians will start receiving as early as May 2011.

The CMS will open registration for the incentive program in January. Physicians can begin signing up for the program then.

To sign up, eligible Medicare physicians must have: (1) a national provider identifier and be enrolled in the CMS Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (PECOS), which validates and tracks the enrollment of providers and suppliers in the Medicare program, and (2) an active user account in the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES), which assigns unique identifiers to health plans and providers in exchanging health information.

To begin receiving payments, physicians must verify that they have demonstrated meaningful use of certified Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for 90 days.

Physicians do not have to inform CMS of which certified EHR system they are using until they submit information verifying they have met meaningful use requirements. As a result, physicians may use an EHR that hasn’t yet been certified but that they expect will qualify for certification by the time they verify that they have demonstrated meaningful use for 90 days.

Related articles: CMS will start incentive payments in May 2011

Do you have a hurricane emergency plan in place?

Hurricane season begins June 1 and national forecasters are predicting that fifteen tropical storms and five to eight hurricanes will threaten the U.S. this year, with four of them expected to pose a major threat.

Customers should have a plan that accommodates where their key personnel will work after the storm other than their original work space.  Customer equipment that is not being serviced out of one of our datacenter facilities should be tested for remote worker access.  Matrix cannot take responsibility for the care and custody of customer infrastructure that operates outside our facilities.

We strongly urge our customers to have an emergency response plan in place for your office.  In addition to securing your critical infrastructure remember that the most important piece in your emergency response plan should be the safety of your employees.