by Joel Berman
One of the reasons for the great success of MEDITECH’s MAGIC and C/S NPR systems is flexibility. Prior to NPR, users had very little opportunity to create custom screens, custom attributes, custom rules or custom report writer fields. In the days of $T and MIIS, users had to request customizations from MEDITECH. User defined fields in the NPR report writer enabled us to write special report fields but also allowed us to do things like write data to a 9-track tape (yes, I know I’m dating myself) or to ftp output long before MEDITECH supported it. Customer Defined Screens (CDS) have been a fantastic feature of these systems for many years. Users figured out how to use the attributes to make these screens work in ways that MEDITECH never even conceived of, including things such as user defined pop-up screens and calling an NPR report in a CDS attribute to pull in some information from another part of the system. These and other features such as report macros and rules allowed users to react to their hospital’s needs in a timely, economical and flexible way.
With the introduction of FOCUS (aka 6.0 or Advanced Technology), the game has changed. While MEDITECH allows you to create user defined fields, you can only do so under the watchful eye of a Wizard. The days of an attribute and an equal sign are over. You can only fill in what the Wizard king lets you fill in. Is this a giant step backward? Maybe. Why would MEDITECH do this? By using a Wizard, MEDITECH can make sure you can only enter what they want you to enter. It’s true that you no longer have to learn the MAGIC syntax that I suspect some of you hate. Be careful what you wish for. Without the open equal sign, the ability to come up with creative solutions is greatly reduced. I suspect MEDITECH assumes that they will end up with fewer support calls.
On the other hand, when you find out what you’ve lost, you might want to call the Wizard to ask why or to ask them how to get that flexibility back.
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