One of the new features in FlexMedical 6 is what we call “Reading Graphs.” Reading Graphs are very powerful, but one of the primary functions they accomplish is creating the common “Growth Chart.” Why the different name? Because our engine allows for plotting not only vitals values, but lab results as well. Any value can be plotted against any other value and even the patient’s age. FlexMedical can also convert used units to different ones on fly, for example, converting pounds to kilograms.

FlexMedical 6 comes will all standard CDC growth charts and preloaded reference data for males and females.

To close out the “New Leaf” series, I want to talk about the future of things that are both company and product related. I spend a great deal of time pondering the direction both need to take to best serve our clients, while also figuring out the best way to grow our business and maintain our responsive support. On top of that, we have to take government mandates such as Meaningful Use, into account. Below are a few highlights of ideas we are focusing on for 2011.

Government Incentive Programs

There are multiple incentive programs that the government has going, Meaningful Use only being one of them. We, as a vendor, have two responsibilities to our clients: functionality and education. First, the software has to be able to technically do whatever is required to participate in the incentive program. Second, and this is where most vendors fall short, we should provide as much information as we can to help our customers utilize those functions in the software to meet those requirements. Most people, end-users and vendors alike, seem to focus on the “will it do?” and not really give any attention to the “how does it do?” We are closely monitoring these shifting government requirements and will not only be developing the features needed to comply, but also developing documentation and other educational resources to keep our clients informed of these requirements and how to meet them with FlexMedical.

Office Productivity

As our FlexMedical client base has grown, so too has the size of our client’s integration of FlexMedical in more day-to-day practices. The system is used to track nearly everything in an office, which means the average number of users per office using the system has increased greatly. This has presented new opportunities for FlexMedical to further optimize an office’s operations, including such things as more advanced collaborative communication, customizable workflows, and more enterprise level features. All of these, while designed with our larger clients in mind, will definitely benefit all of our clients, regardless of size.

Patient Communication

The 24×7, always connected, instant access world is upon us, and your patients are no different from any other customer out there: they want to be able to self-service certain parts of their healthcare experience. Allowing patients to view parts of their medical record, update information, and request services from their physician’s office allows the patient to take control of certain aspects of their health and gives an office a “24×7 feel” without adding nearly any overhead to current staff and processes.

Mobile Access

Patients aren’t the only ones that like anytime, anywhere access. Our latest version of FlexMedical improved the remote, full-featured experience via laptop/netbook and internet connection tremendously, but we know that true mobile device access is also important. We have already made changes in FlexMedical’s infrastructure to allow for a variety of access options that we weren’t able to implement previously, and now we are experimenting with different platforms to see what kind of experiences these platforms can deliver. Having a “mobile app” is not enough – many vendors have an app that has extremely limited access so they can claim “yes we work on a mobile platform” but in day-to-day use, the experience is less than stellar and usually frustrating. We want to deliver something that gives a truly value-added experience and actually allows our clients to “do” things while mobile, further reducing their tether to the physical office.

More Education Opportunities

In part 2, I talked about increasing the quality of our documentation. While this is definitely important, we also feel that offering other educational opportunities, such as webinars, instructional videos, and user group meetings would provide further insight into the FlexMedical experience. I have personally noticed that many suggestion requests that come to me are already in the system, but the user either has forgotten about it since their training, or the feature wasn’t in the system when they trained. Our goal is to reduce these occurrences and make sure our clients are using FlexMedical to its fullest potential now, and as it evolves.

These are just a few of the more important items that we are investing resources in for 2011. Our focus is not only improving the product, but improving our customer’s experience with it. I hope these blog entries have provided some insight behind our processes and our focus for the next year.

As stated in part one of this series of posts, one of our goals for this year is to provide more information about upcoming releases and long term plans for FlexMedical. This is more important than ever because of industry-shifting events, such as the HiTECH act, the move to HIPAA 5010, and ICD-10.

The Roadmap

The first step to any clear view of the future is “the roadmap.” The roadmap is basically a tentative schedule of upcoming versions of the software and what changes are planned for those versions. Roadmaps are constantly changing due to requirement changes, such as a new government mandate, but generally are stable for the upcoming releases. Only the releases six months out or later are usually subject to change. The roadmap will be published in our customer forum in the coming weeks and updated quarterly.

Quarterly Release Schedule

In the past we have not really had a set “schedule” for software releases. Due to our increasing growth and in order to better schedule our resources, we will be moving to a quarterly release schedule after Meaningful Use stage 1 work is complete. Minor updates will be released as needed to fix any significant issues, but major updates will be scheduled for the end of a calendar quarter. Offices can choose to update to the latest version at any time they choose using our new and improved single-click autoupdate functionality, provided the client has an active software support plan in place.

Documentation

While implementing new features and improvements is a good thing, if there is little documentation to explain how to use the feature, it likely will never get used. Documentation gets much more attention than has been in the past. Not only will FlexMedical’s help files be improving over this year, but we plan to have education available via blog posts from myself and my support staff. We are also considering webinars, online videos, and the possibility of regular FlexMedical user group meetings. More information will be posted as these items are organized.

All of these objectives will keep our customers better informed, where FlexMedical stands, what is coming in updates, and how to use those new features.

This is the first in a three part series of posts regarding the company, the product, and the future of both.

OCERIS is celebrating its 14th year developing solutions for the healthcare industry. So much has changed since I started programming the first version of what was to become FlexMedical back in 1997, but my vision for this company has always been the same: make the day-to-day operations of my customers more efficient, make them more money, and provide a level of customer service that has all but been abandoned by most companies out there. It is a tall order, but why do something if you aren’t going to do it right?

In the past, I was very guarded about competitive information that came from my company. I didn’t want to reveal too much because we were small and had several advantages that I wanted to capitalize on before some large competitor with unlimited resources got wind of what we did and tried to copy it. But times have changed… We are no longer a small company with a handful of clients. In the past, we could communicate with our customer base just by calling them all in a day. These days, this is completely implausible and we never really sat down and decided how to continue communication with our growing client base. This was one of those things that we planned to “eventually” address, but as I’m sure most busy people can relate to, without significant discipline and solid due dates, things can slide into obscurity. Because of recent changes in the healthcare industry, communication has become even more important than ever before, and that made us start reevaluating our past justifications for being “quiet.”

The past year has been a very pivotal year for a number of reasons. First, we realized that we diffused our focus from our most important responsibility, which is maintaining and supporting FlexMedical, while branching into some other ventures. Second, the government stepped in to mandate certain changes that affected FlexMedical and all of our clients with the HiTECH Act. Third, we were in a new stage of company growth that required us to look at our processes and further optimize our procedures in order to continue to provide our growing customer base with a consistent and impressive level of customer service.

In late 2010, we began really looking inward and making changes to increase our efficiency, overhaul our image, and start thinking and acting like the larger company that we are. Our customers want and need to have access to things like a peer support forum, roadmaps for future versions, and constant communication of our position on important items such as government mandates, insurance industry changes, etc.

This leads me to our most significant visible change to the outside world: transparency. With so many communication outlets available today, there is no reason to be closed off and try to remain private anymore. I have always wanted to give more of an insight into the inner workings of the company, our team, and our product. Unlike the mega-corporations that have a product with countless nameless participants, some of which are there just to collect a paycheck, we are a small company of dedicated individuals that are proud of our product and the relationships we have with our customers. We want to promote ourselves because we believe in our product offering and feel that we can provide a better experience than our competition.

With our recent website redesign and our internal restructuring, we now have the platform to deliver this transparency to let people know what we are doing, what is coming down the road, and why we believe we deliver one of the best experiences the market has to offer.