Next time you go to the hospital or doctor’s office, you may find the staff using a computer instead of pen and paper. Do not be upset, because the work they are doing is the first of several steps in a nationwide plan to enhance the process of healthcare by improving patient safety, reducing cost, and providing tools to you to help manage your care. E-prescribing is one of those steps.

Why Change

It is estimated that over 4 billion prescriptions will be written in 2010 alone—constituting one of the largest paper based processes in the United States. From those prescriptions, there will be over 150,000 errors that lead to roughly 7,000 deaths. These errors are due in large part to illegible handwriting or missed drug interactions. E-prescribing is a logical solution that is looking to dramatically reduce these errors.

Benefits of E-prescribing

The benefits of E-prescribing can be categorized into two areas, namely Consumer and Provider. Let’s take a looks at both:

Consumer benefits:

• Convenience: It is estimated that 4 out of 5 patients walking into a doctor’s office will leave with a prescription in hand. Consumers must then travel to pharmacies, drop off the paper slip, then wait (or come back) to pick up their prescription. With E-prescribing, the prescription is send electronically over a secure network to the patients preferred pharmacy—over 97% of chain pharmacies already participate.
• Improved Medication Safety: Electronic prescribing has the potential to dramatically lower medication errors. By eliminating handwriting, pharmacies are able to better understand the prescription and thus dispense it to consumers with greater accuracy.
• No Cost to Consumer: since E-prescribing has significant benefits at the provider level, installation charges will be absorbed by pharmacies and providers. This is great news for patients, and will aid in speeding along the adoption rate.

Provider Benefits:

• Convenience: While it may take more initial time to enter medical and prescription information into an EMR (Electronic Medical Record), quick follow up access should pay large long term dividends to most providers. As an added benefit, most E-prescribing systems can access a patient’s insurance plan information. This means physicians can prescribe medications that are covered by the insurance carrier—thus avoiding pharmacy delays and calls.
• Streamlined process: E-prescribing streamlines the communication process between the hospital /doctor’s office and the pharmacy. This ultimately saves time by reducing phone calls from the pharmacy and the patient. Plus the provider can answer questions electronically for better record keeping
• Improved Safety: No hospital or practice wants to make a mistake with a prescription. E-prescribing has built in medicine interaction software that helps find potential problems before the doctor sends the prescription—as well as making sure it is legible. Also, when E-prescribing is combined with EMR software, the patient’s full medical history is available during the exam.

Background

If you own a business; no doubt you have embraced computer technology as part of your daily routine. Computers contribute in areas such as: computerized quotes, office documents, billing software, Customer retention software, online meetings, and calendaring events—to name just a few. These advancements have lead companies to shift away from paper storage to electronic data storage as their primary solution. Electronic storage is inexpensive, easily accessible and seemingly limitless. But where is all of that data stored and how secure is that storage? Offsite data protection has been created to fill the need of securing vital electronic information.

How does it work?

To start, let’s talk about how data is typically stored at a company’s location. Most likely, your company has a computer that serves as a central repository for vital information. This device is the central hub for sharing information within your organization and is called a SERVER. Each morning users (employees) log onto this server, and as they work, data is shared and stored on this central computer. Some Servers come with built in redundancy called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). A Raid configuration is nothing more than several separate internal hard drives that act in unison to reduce the risk of data loss if one hard drive should fail. Such redundancy will help a business recover data should there be a hard drive failure. It is important to note that this failsafe does not count as a backup solution—since an electrical spike, virus, or numerous other disasters could render both drives unusable.

As a first line of defense most companies have adopted an external hard drive or tape as a backup of the server’s information. This external device is then carried offsite each day as part of the business’s disaster recovery plan. This works well as long as the employee manually carries the backup offsite each and every business day. Unfortunately the facts state otherwise.

The facts*

The truth is that 55% of small businesses rate themselves as having a “fair” or “poor” disaster recovery plan for their electronic data, 30% admit they have no formal daily routine for their backup procedures, and 13% admit that even when they perform a backup, they never remove the backed up device off the companies site. Such inconsistencies can represent untold hours of data recovery time should a disaster occur—or worse yet, totally unrecoverable data.

Enter off-site back up

Offsite backup is a cost effective way to help ensure correct daily backups of a company’s critical data. Instead of making a copy on site, a business hires an outside vendor to act as their offsite storage location. Critical data is sent daily via a secure internet connection to a remote storage facility. As an added precaution, these venders typically use several separate locations to store your company’s data. Best of all, the cost for such a solution is pro-rated according to the amount of information you send—most small businesses can expect to pay under $100 per month for up to 20GB of offsite storage. Plus, the offsite partner can help with replacing the data to the server should disaster strike. Using this solution also frees company employees from the burden of maintaining and transporting external devices offsite.

• Never store critical data locally on a desktop or laptop computer without having a backup solution
• Make sure to have redundancy built into the main storage center (i.e. RAID configuration)
• Review (or develop) a Disaster Recovery Plan at least once per year.
• Have at least 2 backups of the company’s critical data (no, RAID doesn’t count).
• Consider replacing dated onsite backups with an offsite backup solution—better yet, have both and keep the external backup onsite.

*Imation data storage user survey 2004

Simple really, VoIP (or Voice over Internet Protocol) allows you to combine voice, data and video into one easy to manage package. By using the internet to send and receive voice information, small businesses are discovering that VoIP is a cost effective way to increase functionality with their phone system. In fact most mid-sized businesses can expect to see up to a 40% savings on their phone bill by switching to a VoIP system*.

Past and Present

VoIP is not new, in fact it has been around since the 1970’s, but limiting broadband connections kept it in the background until recently. In order for VoIP to function correctly, 64 to 100 kbps is needed per phone line—certainly not available by the dial up connections of the 1980’s. But today with our high speed broadband connections, VoIP is finding new life as a strong business tool that can unify business connections with their customers. Features such as video conferencing and advanced call menus become seamlessly integrated solutions that are fully scalable as your company grows. In fact take a look at some of the call features that are already part of most VoIP installations:

Call features

Automated Attendant, Blacklists, Blind Transfer, Call Detail Records, Call Forward on Busy, Call forward on No Answer, Call Forward Variable, Call Monitoring, Call Parking, Call Queuing, Call Recording, Call Routing (DID & ANI), Call Snooping, Call Transfer, Call Waiting, Caller ID, Caller ID Blocking, Caller ID on Call Waiting, Calling Cards, Conference Bridging, Dial by Name, Direct Inward System Access, Do Not Disturb, Interactive Directory Listing, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Local and Remote Call Agents’ Music On Hold, and much more.

VoIP for You

One of the core concerns with VoIP centers around the loss of internet connection—lose the internet, lose your phone system. This is an excellent point and one not to be overlooked. However, with analog to digital cards from companies such as Sangoma (www.sangoma.com), installers can build in redundancy by integrating analog phone lines as a backup solution. These analog lines act as a failsafe should internet connections go down—and can also be used for direct fax lines.

*VoIP News 2009

The story of Big Bob

Meet Big Bob Brody. Bob has owned Big Bob’s Discount Flooring (BBDF) for 4 years now and is known as an honest, knowledgeable businessman to his local customers. When it comes to flooring, Bob can explain advantages and disadvantages between most any floor covering. In a nutshell, Bob knows flooring.

Bob is looking to increase business and that means marketing—something Bob doesn’t know. He does know that he needs a website because that’s what everyone told him he needs. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really understand how a website can help BBDF to grow, so his site is mainly comprised of a few static pages that show what his company sells, as well as a picture of Bob with his favorite dog “Bark”. Bob also knows that in business, he needs business cards.

Let’s take a look at Big Bob’s business card:

Bob needs some help

For many small business owners, Bob’s marketing frustrations are all too familiar. What they don’t realize is that in business, people judge them by their website as well as their email name. While bark&me@yahoo.com may be a perfectly acceptable email name for Bob’s personal email, it lacks the professionalism needed in the business world.

Change that email

The good news is that Big Bob has the ability to change his email for little or no cost. When you register your domain name with places such as GoDaddy, Host Monster, or Register.com (to name a few), you can also have your email included for very little extra cost. And if even small costs seem too high, companies such as Google will let you host your email for free.

Here is how it works for Google Apps:

Say you own a web site domain name like BBDF.com that you paid for at a domain hosting company. With a Google Apps account associated with this domain, you can create up to 50 users (in the free plan) in Google Apps, like Bob.brody@BBDF.com, Sales@BBDF.com, and chris.smith@BBDF.com. Each employee gets his or her own email account, calendar (for sharing amongst the group), instant messenger account on Google Talk, and Google Docs account for sharing and collaborating on office documents like spreadsheets, Word documents, and slide shows—all for free.

Now before you begin to believe that Google Apps is world’s greatest invention, remember that Google’s free plan has no real tech support and if their servers goes down, you’re down as well. For this reason as a company grows to over 10 computers, they should consider adopting an in-house exchange server to host their email. But for now, Bob is thrilled to have his companies email changed to reflect his domain name.

So let’s take a look at Bob’s new business cards:

Moving Forward

Bob has seen the light and is now moving forward with changing his website to be more interactive for his customers. In the future, his contracting clients will be able to search, compare, and purchase floor coverings right through Bob’s website. Looks like BBDF is on the right path for success.