InSight Conference 2013

I just got confirmation that I will be co-presenting at this year's InSight user group conference again this year with Dr. Mark Pratt and Bonnie McGuire. I co-presented on two sessions with them last year; it was a great time and a great opportunity to share ideas and meet other people that work with McKesson products. This year, the two educational sessions that we're presenting in are on Friday morning, so make sure that you get an afternoon or evening flight home.

If you have not had the opportunity to check out this conference yet, I highly recommend it. It's a great opportunity to see what's coming up, to hear how some other hospitals have faced (and overcome) the same issues that you may be experiencing, to meet other folks and share ideas, and to even hear directly from McKesson about what they think about all of these things.

If you are going to be able to attend this year, I'd love to meet you. I have such a good time geeking out about this stuff and talking about new and interesting ways to use the system.

Milestones and Accomplishments

It's pretty amazing to be able to say this, but we just recently hit 10,000 views on this blog.  I know in the grand scheme of things, that's a drop in the bucket to what many sites get; some have gotten 10,000 hits in the span of time that it's taken for you to read this far into the post.  However, I still feel that it's an accomplishment worth noting.

Visit thinkiforms.com for
more information

Another accomplishment worth noting is that I've made the leap. You know, THE leap from working for a hospital to working as a consultant, and finally, now, for myself.  I've started a new company, "Think iForms, LLC" and am currently personally available to consult for short-term, long-term, or even in a mentoring role.  Do you want to get "Feature X" working?  Give me a call.  My contact information can be found on my website.

And you heard it here first, I am licensing my software that can Automatically Convert an HEO Outline to a VGR iForm.  This is a game changer that can catapult your sites in the speed and sheer number of iForms that you will be able to produce.  I'm piloting the software now; if you would like to be included in the pilot program or would like to see a working demo, contact me at scott@thinkiforms.com.  This is a limited time (and limited number of sites) pilot, so act now.

Happy 2013 - jQuery iForm Library, Anyone?

Happy New Year, everyone! The year 2012 was quite a year, wasn't it? And with 2013 just now beginning, I see a world of possibilities ahead of us. There are some exciting and scary things coming ahead in the world of CPOE; if your facility has attested for Meaningful Use phase 1, you have an idea of what I'm talking about.

I have some projects that I would love to unveil at some point this year. One of which I'd like to get some community feedback first. I've created a jQuery plug-in specifically geared toward iForms.

The Benefits of Building an Outline for VGR iForms

We started building our VGR iForms before we got any real formalized training, but fortunately for us, we hadn't started using VGR until close to when we went for training. During the training, we got some very good advice:

"When building a VGR iForm, it's best practice to build an outline with all of your orderables first."

We didn't get a full explanation of the reason at the time, but I can tell you from just a few months experience and looking at the larger picture, it's the best advice that he could've given us. The quick explanation that he gave to us was that it helped separate the clinical duties / responsibilities from the technical / development duties and that's certainly true, but it's only a piece of the puzzle.

FTP Notes and Rules

When I first started working on our iForms, no one could give me a lot of information on what directory did what, where to post VGR, where to post HTML, etc. I kinda had to experiment on my own and as a result we had a few emergency releases to LIVE. I've compiled my notes on FTP and the server locations we use. I'm not sure if they're universal among McKesson systems or not, but I figured hey... all theses notes, surely there's a kernel of wisdom in there somewhere (statistics right?).

So here we go...

Reader Request - Submit While Using Tabs

I've always wanted to do something like this: "Reader's Requests."  Well, there was a question posted on the "Welcome, Make Yourself at Home" post from Jason (see, now I imagine reading this with my awful Casey Casum impression):

I was wondering how you handle submitting when using a tabbed iform. (one HTML page with multiple tabs via JavaScript)

Example: (abominal pain)
Tab 1 - Lower abd pain - has 3 prechecked selections
tab 2 - Upper abd pain - has 4 prechecked selections.

When you submit, how do you submit the orders on one tab without the orders on the other tab also being submitted?

-Jason

This is an excellent question: as it's phrased, it can't be done; you can't submit some of the items in a web form. However, there are ways to work around these limitations. Let's take a look at a few of them to see what the pro's and con's are.

A Thousand Hits

For whatever strange reason, I like to keep an eye on the statistics of the blog, how many visits we get in a given day and what kinds of articles people are reading.  It's not that I'm an attention hog (as far as I can tell), but I like to know that what we're doing here is actually helping people.

I started this blog two months ago and today we got our 1,000th view.  In my first post, dated 4/28, I said,

"I couldn't find anything, and I mean ANYTHING when searching for HEO, VGR, or iForms on any of the major search engines that was referential or helpful for iForm-specific development. I know that there are some resources out there (we'll go over those), but as they say, 'If you can't find it, it [essentially] doesn't exist.'"

I guess I wasn't the only one that has been looking.

Welcome, Make Yourself at Home

I've been watching the traffic for the blog for these last few weeks and it seems that my assumption was correct. Even with the vast reaches of the Internet, there really isn't much to be found about McKesson's VGR scripting language and so people are ending up here. So welcome, we're so glad that you found us.

As you've probably noticed, Russ and I like to tackle problems and share ideas. If you ever have any questions about the solutions that we propose here, please don't hesitate to ask. I can't promise that we'll always have answers or that we will be able to respond very quickly, but I can promise that we'll help whenever and however we can. We have more ideas of what to share in the coming weeks, but your questions could turn into blog posts of their own.

If you've found this blog to be helpful, and even if you don't have any questions, take a second to leave a comment or just to say hello. It will help us keep motivated to know that real people are out there.

Hello World - A Message from Russ

I guess I'll follow Scott's example. I'm Russ Garlow Jr, I work at South Georgia Medical Center in Valdosta, GA. We're a 335 bed, 3k+ employee hospital in Southwest GA. We have an outstanding CPOE dept with six members, but I'm the first dedicated iForm designer. The others did some tweaking before I came on board, but none of them really had time to delve into the murky depths of iForms or VGR. They had looked at outsourcing it, but that wasn't practical based on the number of forms we would have and the time that needs to go into them. You really need to have someone working on them full time. So they got me and sent me to training.

Hello World - A Message from Scott

Well here goes nothing. First, let's get introductions out of the way.  My name is Scott Morris and I work for Fairfield Medical Center in Lancaster, OH.  I'm their "iForm guy."  If you work at a hospital with McKesson's HEO (Horizon Expert Orders) system, you'll know what I'm talking about.  If you don't have any idea what I just said, then this blog will probably not make much sense to you.