Recently a MEDITECH hospital wanted to export a handful of MOX databases, since they were migrating away from MOX. I have done a few of these in the past on rare occasions (on a “per database” basis), and most of the programming time was spent on mapping and cleanup — not on the actual extraction of the data itself.

In this blog post, I’ll discuss how I figured out how to write a generic export in an NPR report, so savvy NPR programmers can do this for themselves in the future.

One of the challenges of DR-based report development is the same as for NPR or RD … where is the data you want stored? One way to find out is to go into MEDITECH and find the field, and — if you're lucky — you can do:

If you’ve started using Microsoft’s SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) toolkit to create, schedule, and deliver extracts (machine-readable files) to vendors, non-MEDITECH applications, and even internal users who love their Excel, then you know that the same kinds of requirements come up over and over again…

Which means you can speed your SSIS development, and make it more flexible and easier to maintain, by creating an extract template to use each time you start a new project.

A common challenge in reporting (or extracting data, in this case) that we see over and over again is the need to transform one data structure into another. The best arrangement of data for the programmer writing the online application is not necessarily the best arrangement for the person writing a report, or an extract.

CMS Does Not Make Things Easy

Sometimes you just have to wonder… New ICD-10 diagnosis and procedural coding has been brought into play in the United Status (October 1, 2015 for diagnosis codes; next year for procedure codes), and CMS has — though a substantial effort — identified sets of equivalent codes between the -9 and -10 code sets. Your first thought may be, “This is huge! A tremendous help!” (If you want more details about this effort and you have not seen it already, check out the GEM website for Diagnoses and Procedures).

October 1 is coming fast, which means that this year (2015) US healthcare finally gets to join the rest of the world in using the ICD-10 codeset for diagnoses.

You may have noticed that MEDITECH standard NPR report screens can have "display only" fields, but in customer reports, there is no attribute or standard method to provide the same feature. In a CDS, you could just set the "Echo Name" flag to Y when building the screen.

with Mitchell Lawrence, HIS Programmer Analyst at Iatric Systems

Overview

Many sites using SQL Server Reporting Services will use the External Links feature in MEDITECH to route a user to the "top" of the reporting portal. However, you can also set up a structure in NPR that lets you invoke the user’s web browser and provide a URL to go to the reporting portal and open a specific report directly from a MEDITECH menu.