I don't know about everyone else, but I feel that was as Meditech users,
really need to get Meditech to improve on their programming accuracy. I've
run into more and more programming problems that have totally unintended
consequences unrelated to the problems that they were supposed to fix. Below
is an e-mail that I sent to our VP of IT this morning. I would like to see
some discussion on the L as to how to go about getting Meditech to change.
Thanks, Charlie
We had a huge problem which we discovered last week, but only realized
the
consequences this weekend from a DTS which Meditech moved to Live on
Thursday. Pharmacy
Issue #5294828 was a problem that one had to give a reason when
re-processing a billing
error when we should have not been prompted for a reason. For some reason,
this tied to the
drug dictionary where one had to give a reason when updating it. This was
totally unrelated
to billing, yet when they moved this to live, it not only caused Pyxis
billing to stop, but
each time an item was removed, it credited a previously removed item. When I
called on
Thursday, Meditech denied that this was what was causing my problem. I've
pasted what they
found was the problem below:
Rebhan,Maria (MEDITECH) - Jun 18, 2007 - 0948 EDT: Brian, there is a
problemwith the DTS
we delivered. It was patched correctly but, the code from it iswrong.
I've fixed this
Inhouse and will just need change control for TEST. Tx
If this issue would have been a billing issue, I would have tested it
thoroughly before
having them move it to live, but it was not a billing issue. I am seeing
more and more of
this that when Meditech moves a DTS to test or live, it has uninteded
consequences that are
often not noticed until we are live with it, because no amount of testing
will pick up an
unintended change entirely unrelated to the DTS. Another example is Pharmacy
Issue
#5237726. It was supposed to fix a problem with a field not defaulting from
the formulary
service when adding a new drug (FirstDataBank). After this was moved to
live, I noticed
that we could not look up drugs as we had before and instead had to use
extra keystrokes
for look-ups.
The hours to correct all of the billing problems is huge. I strongly
feel that Meditech
needs to be held accountable for what I see as increasingly sloppy
programming. I would
like to see us file a formal complaint with Meditech over this issue since
this is one of
many times that I have seen this happen in pharmacy and cause huge problems.
Meditech does
not even have a Pyxis machine to test out the Pyxis fixes, and instead is
relying on the
users to test the fixes. In addition, they need to thorougly test other
programming changes
more thoroughly instead of using their customers as basically alpha test
sites.
Unfortunately, sometimes we only find out about these programming errors
after the fact,
which is not right.
Hopefully, by filing a formal complaint, we can get their attention, but
I would hold
my breath. We had an interesting discussion at MUSE about how to get
Meditech to change
their business practices, and short of a large group of users agreeing to
withhold
maintenance payments, I don't see them changing. Perhaps it is time for
Meditech users to
band together and consider such action.
Charles Downs PharmD
Washington County Hospital
251 E. Antietam Street
Hagerstown, MD, 21740
301-790-8904
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