UNI/CARE - Pro-Filer™ News: Pro-Filer.xRM Preview

UNI/CARE is previewing their upcoming version of Pro-Filer™ called Pro-Filer.xRM at the California Institute for Mental Health Information Management for Behavioral Health Conference in Hollywood, CA.

I would love to be there, but I'm still finishing up a few things for ITX Enterprises before I leave. I have heard rumors about some of the new UI though, and it is going to be amazing. I'm sure your users will love it.

Below is the press release from UNI/CARE's website:

GW

UNI/CARE, in partnership with Microsoft, to premier Pro-Filer.xRM at the CiMH 10th Annual Behavioral Health Information Management Conference and Exposition
April 9, 2010

Pro-Filer.xRM demonstration attendees eligible to win an Asus Eee PC Netbook featuring Microsoft Windows® 7

Sarasota, Florida, April 9, 2010 – UNI/CARE Systems, Inc., a leading provider of technical solutions to the Human Services Community and the developer of Pro-Filer™, will premier their Pro-Filer.xRM enterprise solution upgrade, in partnership with Microsoft, at the 10th Annual Behavioral Health Information Management Conference and Exposition: Addressing the Needs of Mental Health, Alcohol, and Other Drug Programs, hosted by the California Institute for Mental Health and to be held April 14 - 15, 2010 in Hollywood, California.

The Pro-Filer.xRM product premier is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 14, 2010.  Pro-Filer.xRM, an upgrade to the Pro-Filer™ Electronic Health Record, is a .NET centric Human Services Enterprise platform designed to support the information requirements of human service organizations providing a wide array of clinical and financial services. Pro-Filer.xRM's service-oriented architecture aligns with the Microsoft Connected HHS framework and incorporates Microsoft Dynamics' business management solution , which will also be demonstrated by the UNI/CARE and Microsoft Team.  Additional highlights of the demonstration will include Pro-Filer.xRM's Health Information Technology (HIT) compliance with California standards, implementation specifications and certification criteria for Electronic Health Records.  Demonstration attendees can also enter an exclusive drawing to win an Asus Eee PC Netbook featuring Microsoft Windows® 7.

Additionally, UNI/CARE will be sponsoring the Exhibitor Reception scheduled for Wednesday, April 14 from 5:15 p.m. - 6:45 p.m. in the Exhibit Hall.  “UNI/CARE is committed to sponsoring events that provide the human services community with a forum to discuss state-of-the-art best practices and tools designed to foster the provision of quality care, revenue management and interoperability,” said May Ahdab, Ph.D., President and CEO of UNI/CARE.

CiMH's Annual Conference is the nation’s longest running and most well-attended Information Management Conference for the California behavioral health care field. The CiMH conference and trade show has become an essential meeting ground for all stakeholders to stay up-to-date on these developments and to view the latest versions of software products for their organizations.

UNI/CARE, in partnership with Microsoft, is exhibiting at the Annual Conference at booths #313, 315, 317.  For more information about CiMH's 10th Annual Behavioral Health Information Management Conference and Exposition: Addressing the Needs of Mental Health, Alcohol, and Other Drug Programs, please visit www.cimh.org.

About the California Institute for Mental Health (CiMH)

The California Institute for Mental Health (CiMH) was established in 1993 to promote excellence in mental health services through training, technical assistance, research and policy development. Local mental health directors founded CiMH to work collaboratively with all mental health system stakeholders. The commitment to collaboration has led the board to expand board membership to include consumers, family members, and other interested persons representing the public interest.  For more information, visit www.cimh.org.

About UNI/CARE Systems, Inc.

For more than 25 years, UNI/CARE has provided integrated clinical/financial software solutions to an impressive array of behavioral healthcare organizations. In an industry marked by uncertainty and quickly shifting technology trends, our success has enhanced our mission to continuously provide quality value to our customers.

UNI/CARE Systems, Inc.’s Corporate Office is located at 540 North Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida 34236. The phone number is (941) 954-3403, fax (941) 954-2033. For more information, visit www.unicaresys.com or contact UNI/CARE Systems, Inc.

Copyright ©2010 UNI/CARE. All rights reserved.

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Crystal Reports® Tips and Tricks: Creating a Green Bar Effect

Do you remember green bar paper? It was wide continuous feed paper meant for giant dot matrix printers used by accounting departments. The paper was printed with alternating white and light green bars. The purpose of the green bars was to make it easier to follow a single line of data across the printed sheet.

I personally prefer this method over adding grid lines to the report. In this post, I'll show you how to simulate that green bar effect in Crystal Reports®.

Here is a down and dirty report that I created from the AdventureWorks database. Very simple, it gives the last name, first name and phone number from the Contact table. As you can see it gets difficult to know which phone number belongs to which name.

 

What we need to do now is add our green bars. With the report in design mode within Crystal Reports®, right click and select section expert.

Select the details section.

Now select the color tab.

Select the formula editor button (x+2) to bring up the format formula editor and enter the following line of code:

If remainder(RecordNumber,4) in [2,3] then Color (228, 255, 223) else crNoColor

The formula divides the record number by four. If the remainder equals two or three, it prints a light green bar as a background color for the details section. Save and close, then preview the report.

That's more like it, much easier to read and follow. Hope you liked this tip. If I can answer any questions or you have comments, use the comments button below.

Til next time…

GW

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UNI/CARE Pro-Filer™ Reporting: Retrieving a Client's Age on the Day of Service from Their Date of Birth

One of the most common tasks handed to the Pro-Filer™ analyst is producing reports based on the age of the client at the time of service.  Since age is not a field within the database, (it really can't be as it is in continuous flux) this value must be calculated.  We could certainly add a formula to each of our reports or queries to do this, but let's write the code just once and then reference it when needed.  For this purpose we are going to add a user function in SQL to our reporting server.

Since we have the client's birth date stored in:

    Client.BDate

We can use a function to return their age by comparing to whatever date we are measuring against.  In this case let's use the recorded service start time which is stored in:

    RECORDED_SERVICE.STARTTIME

So we create our function with the code below:

begin sql----------------------------------------------->

create function dbo.fn_GetAge
(
      @pDateOfBirth datetime
    , @pAsOfDate datetime
)
returns int
as
begin

declare @vAge int

    if @pDateOfBirth >= @pAsOfDate
     
       return 0

    set @vAge = datediff(YY, @pDateOfBirth, @pAsOfDate)

    if month(@pDateOfBirth) > month(@pAsOfDate) or
      (month(@pDateOfBirth) = month(@pAsOfDate) and
       day(@pDateOfBirth)   > day(@pAsOfDate))

    set @vAge = @vAge - 1

return @vAge
end
go

<-------------------------------------------------end sql

DESCRIPTION
Our function as created accepts two inputs, the date of birth and the comparison date. 

The first if statement is just an error check to ensure that the date of birth is prior to our second date.  If not, it returns a 0.

The set statement starts the process of computing the age for us.  We can't just use a straight datediff function without the remaining if clause however.  Datediff simply returns the number of years between two dates.  So, if today is April 11, 2010 without checking for date, any birth date in 1990 would return an age of 20 even if the birth date has not yet passed for 2010.

USAGE
Let's create a list of clients in the system that were under age 5 at the time of service.  In this case we want the earliest age at which they received services:

begin sql----------------------------------------------->

select

      c.lname + ', ' + c.fname as ClientName

    , c.id as ClientID

    , min(dbo.fn_GetAge (c.bdate, rs.starttime)) as ClientAge

from

               recorded_service_helper rsh

      inner join client c on rsh.client_oid = c.oid

      inner join recorded_service rs on rsh.recorded_service_oid = rs.oid

where       dbo.fn_GetAge (c.bdate, rs.starttime) <= 5
        and rs.recorded_service_voided_moniker is null
        and rs.service_status_moniker is null

group by c.id,c.lname,c.fname

<-------------------------------------------------end sql

Hopefully this will help make your job just a wee-bit easier.

Til next time...

GW

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UNI/CARE Pro-Filer™ Reporting: The Enigma of the OIDs – What they are, what they do, how to create them and why there is no need to fear them.

It doesn't take long after you begin your Pro-Filer™ implementation that you become aware of the word "OID".  OID is an acronym for Object IDentifier.  In the Pro-Filer™ database OIDs are used as a means of linking data through primary and foreign key relationships.  On both the primary key and foreign key exists a matching OID.  This is how Pro-Filer™ knows that one record is related to another.  It is critical then that every OID within a system be unique.  The first column of every table in Pro-Filer™ is the OID column.  Every row in every table of a Pro-Filer™ database has its unique OID existing in that first column of the table.

An OID is an identifier standard that UNI/CARE uses within Pro-Filer™. The intent of using OIDs is to enable distributed systems to uniquely identify information without any central coordination. Thus, each UNI/CARE Pro-Filer™ installation can create an OID and use it to identify a record within the database with reasonable confidence that the identifier will never be unintentionally used by anyone for anything else. Therefore, information labeled with OIDs can be later combined into a single database without needing to resolve name conflicts.

An OID is a 128 bit number displayed as a 32 character hex-decimal:

    18F55E86905C413280551BE264FB8D0B

128-bits is big enough and the generation algorithm is unique enough that if 1,000,000,000 OIDs per second were generated for 1 year the probability of a duplicate would be only 50%. Or if every human on Earth generated 600,000,000 OIDs there would only be a 50% probability of a duplicate.

We can generate an OID within Microsoft SQL by using the following code:

     select newid()

Which will return the result:

    18F55E86-905C-4132-8055-1BE264FB8D0B

As you can see this is in the form of a standard UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) or GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) with the dashes in place.  UNI/CARE strips the dashes from the UUID format in Pro-Filer™ to create an OID.  The code to create an OID without the dashes is shown below:

     select cast(replace(newid(),'-','')as varchar(32))

Which will return the result:

    18F55E86905C413280551BE264FB8D0B

Now, when a user asks you "What the heck is an OID?"; you have the answer.

Til next time...

GW

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Crystal Reports® Tips and Tricks: Brian Bischof - Crystal Reports Subreports: Troubleshooting Shared Variables

Shared variables can be a real bear to troubleshoot.  Brian's article will give you a good head start in solving those seemingly inexplicable issues.  Brian is the author of a passle of  Crystal Reports® books.

Crystal Reports Subreports: Troubleshooting Shared Variables

GW

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Hire an FTE or Outsource Your Business Analaytics?

A few days ago I was discussing possible solutions with a perspective client. His intent was to hire a new employee to handle business analysis for his Community Mental Health Center. I was of course steering him towards using ShareInformatics and outsourcing his business analytics to us. The contract we were discussing was for 40 hours of service per month from ShareInformatics. He thought he wanted to hire an FTE at about 168 hours per month. He could not see how it would be better to only get 40 hours of consulting time rather than the 168 hours of a full-time-employee. Here is what I explained to him.

When you hire ShareInformatics, you get a consultant that is considered to be the leading independent expert in Pro-Filer™ business analysis. You get someone that has to be 100% productive because he has to account for every minute of time that he bills for. This person is also vested in the company’s future. It is in his best interest to see that you get the absolute best customer service possible.

So let’s take an average business analyst at 50K per year salary. Now we add to that the remaining costs:

• 40-60% Actual Employee Productivity
• Most studies have found that the average support employee only spends 40-60% of their paid time working Productively.
• Training in the Behavioral Health field
• Training on the Pro-Filer™ Database
• Crystal Reports Training
• Pro-Filer™ Report Training
• SQL Training
• Unemployment Insurance
• Workman’s Compensation
• Social Security
• Medicare
• Vacation Leave
• Sick Leave
• Holiday Leave
• Bereavement Leave
• Personal Leave
• Jury Duty
• Training
• Retirement Pension
• 401K Plan
• Office Work Space
• Computer
• Software
• Network and Internet Bandwidth
• Telephone
• Utilities
• Recruiting Expenses
• Medical Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• Disability Insurance
• Life Insurance

I don’t need to tell you this; but now our 50K employee is costing us somewhere around 70K and their first year will be spent coming up to speed on the industry, Pro-Filer™ and all the other training that goes with a new employee. In our experience it will take a trained Master’s level business analyst about twelve to eighteen months to be really effective in this industry. Even if we take the high side of the expected productivity, that employee is only going to be productive about 100 out of 168 hours per month, and could be as low as 68 hours!

So let’s compare that with the benefits of outsourcing your business analysis needs to ShareInformatics:

• 100% Productivity – We don’t get paid if we’re not working
• An accurate accounting of how we spent your time
• 10 years’ experience as a business analyst in the Behavioral Health Field
• Nearly a decade of experience on high end Electronic Medical Record systems including Pro-Filer™
• Crystal Reports Expert
• SQL Expert
• Excel Pivot Table Expert
• Xcelsius Expert
• CEO is the visionary designer of the UNI/CARE – ITX Enterprises data warehouse solution
• CEO is author of the core data marts of that solution
• CEO is considered to be the leading independent Pro-Filer™ database expert.

So for less money than our FTE, you are getting far more value for every dollar spent. This is the biggest no-brainer in the history of the world.

If you would be interested in any of ShareInformatics’ solutions or services, please call or email us today.

GW

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