What's in a name?

In teaching NPR, RD, and SQL from DR, a big chunk of my time is spent helping students figure out where data is kept (for example, which segment in NPR), and then what field names are called. MEDITECH segment structures and field names are built “by hand” by the application developer, which results in some unfortunate inconsistencies that make our Report Writing lives harder. This post examines MEDITECH field naming across applications, identifies some various “gotchas” to be aware of, and provides some tips for how to overcome those challenges.

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.

A MEDITECH 6.0 customer recently requested our help to speed up a report she was using to find all accounts with a final abstract date of T-1. Her report, using the “abs.status.x” index was taking several hours to compile, and this was causing issues for some outside vendor.

In an earlier blog tip I showed how to add an “Echo Name” feature to a MAGIC NPR report, but I did not show a method to do the same thing for Client/Server because I assumed I’d need to use the %NPR.UI programs to write data to the screen and fight the Syntax Checker, which attempts to block any calls to %NPR.

Last month we had a Client/Server only tip about a handy Page 1 of N utility. At MUSE our Tips and Tricks session will include an updated version of an approach that will do this for MAGIC NPR reports as well. For this May tip, I will show you how to solve the minor annoyance of having to guess about the NPR master segment and directory for the MOVE REPORTS routine.

The ARRA changes to MAGIC and Client/Server introduce a “Patient Audit” feature for custom (and standard) NPR reports. This month we will describe how the auditing feature works and tell you how you can set a flag in a report to suppress the auditing feature. References to spooling apply to MAGIC sites only.

The MAGIC (and Client/Server) 255 character limit makes it difficult to handle a value that exceeds this length. A reasonably common example is a URL that exceeds 255 characters.