by Joe Cocuzzo
A note on terminology. MEDITECH is now calling their new platform 6.0, but the term FOCUS has already been established. In this post, I’ll use the term 6.0/FOCUS.
The new 6.0/FOCUS platform has a new database design and it is append-only. The database therefore contains its own complete audit trail. Only changes are stored, so to create the current state of the data of an order, registration, assessment, and so on, the data retrieval has to go through all transactions. We have done some very preliminary comparisons of report efficiency between NPR MAGIC, NPR C/S and 6.0/FOCUS and we noticed that 6.0/FOCUS reports can be much slower. You do not see this with well-indexed reports processing only a relatively few transactions, but the difference is dramatic if you write a report that processes many thousands of records.
In our tour, we need to deal with a change in terminology:
Applications are still called applications in 6.0/FOCUS, but…
DPMs are now called 0bjects and Segments are now called Records.
Use of the term Record for something that contains many records is unfortunate. Using “table” or sticking with the old term “segment” would have been better.
There isn’t much documentation available on the new Report Designer. If you go to MEDITECH for training, you get a seminar manual consisting mostly of screen shots. If you are hoping for online documentation, for now:
has been replaced by:
Let’s write an ADM (errr… REG) report that is a bit more complex than the example on the MEDITECH tour. We’ll include insurance information, sorted by the insurance order.
To create a report you can type the title into the Mnemonic field and the report writer will convert it into something MEDITECH calls Hungarian notation. Basically, strip any spaces, and your mixed case cannot contain more than one capital letter in a row or certain punctuation. No more dots in report names!
You’ll notice that MEDITECH provides Basic and Advanced report writing modes. In Basic Mode, you cannot write RULES and you cannot add multiple applications to a report:
For our example report we’ll select the Admissions (REG – Registration) application, the RegAcct object (think DPM), and the Main and InsuranceOrder records (think Segments).
You can only flag one segment as the detail on the main page.
Stay tuned for the next article in this series, “Why can’t I delete or edit the field that is highlighted????!!!!“
1 response so far ↓
1 Owein // Jan 15, 2010 at 4:40 am
MEDITECH did not make up Hungarian notation. It is actually a fairly common notation in use today, particularly in object oriented languages which tend to use the period as an object-method separator. Another less formal synonym for this notation is “Camel Case” (because it has “humps”). Wikipedia has extensive articles about both of these notations.
Leave a Comment