Hey everyone! I’m trying to help our pharmacy IT guy solve a problem with our new system, but can’t find any manuals online or specific places to go with problems. Calling the company seems silly since I don’t actually have any sort of IT title or relationship with the parent company. Anyone have any ideas?
I don’t know where to find info on Meditech, but I have some experience with it from my rotations. What is the problem? Maybe I can help.
Give me more info. I can probably find something for you.
I work in a hospital pharmacy and whenever this comes up we say “Call the 800 number” and hang up. That’s what they’re there for.
Presumably your company has an IT helpdesk with processes for handling calls about particular applications. I’d call them were I you.
Presumably if the company had a help desk with processes for handling calls about particular applications the OP would not be here asking questions
Re-reading the OP, you’re working with the IT guy. Why isn’t he calling Meditech? I’m sure they have 24 hour support.
I’m working with our department IT guy to solve the following TL:DR problem, the reason I’m looking elsewhere is that it isn’t a major thing. It’ll cause less headache for the technicians, but isn’t a major deal in the eyes of TPTB, and they’re probably right. IT guy has suggested a stopgap which isn’t a fix at all.
The problem: when we print the med carts (4x/day), there are often 40-50 partial tablets and other dosage forms that require a label. These entries do not all print labels. The previous solution was to have separate entries for each tablet, with a different suffix indicating unit-dose vs bulk, with a label printing for the bulk entry. The problems with this approach are that it’d require the pharmacist entering the order to distinguish between the dosage forms on each order, it would require separate pricing maintenance on each entry, and if the pharmacist entered the bulk entry, even the correct drug wouldn’t scan.
One solution is to just turn on labels for the entries that we use the most for partial tablets, the problem is that it’s all-or-nothing, and we’d get (example) 8 labels for magnesium oxide 400mg for every 2 doses of 200mg. I’m looking to see if perhaps someone else has experience with this or can point me to a document that would suggest an alternative.
(see? I’m willing to do the research, but the question seems excessively detailed to put in the OP.)
Call the vendor. Really, you’re paying for application support - this is what it’s for.
The vendor won’t care that you’re not IT, as long as you have a reasonable understanding of what you’re talking about. You can always bring in the IT guy if needed.
All of Meditech’s resource manuals are online here. Note that you do require a login and password to access the site. Someone in your IT dept. should be able to get this for you.
I don’t know if your problem is solvable in a way that is acceptable to you (I do lab meditech, not pharmacy) but it sounds like you need to start messing with dictionary settings deep in the system. IT typically does not allow an untrained user the access to do this as it is quite easy to break something.
Meditech’s training and resource manuals are the shits; the best way to learn the system is having access and fiddling with settings in the TEST environment where any breakages will not cause loss of productivity.
The vendor is not typically very responsive to problems that should be solved by the IT/superuser who has been trained to configure the system.
That being said, meditech does have an online task system that can be used to ask whether what you want to do is possible or not. Unfortunately, this requires access to the website in my previous post.
Damn. This is a bigger issue for me than it is for him, so I figured that I could just do enough research and figure it out and take a solution to him.
Oh well, pick your battles, etc. Thanks for your suggestions, everyone!
chaotic, did you get my PM?
Hey - I’m not an expert, but have you tried posting your question to the meditech-l list? they have lots of great readers & you may get good response. The other option (besides calling MEDITECH) is MEDITECH Connect. I haven’t tried them yet but it seems to be an active community.
There might be an application based solution to this, it would be worth discussion with your Meditech PHA consultant. Support is already paid for, and Meditech would be willing to talk with anyone from your IT dept or you, unless you have a parent corporation (HCA for example) where any request to Meditech has to travel from the hospital up to the regional office and then to corporate before Meditech can be involved. Obviously you would want permission from your IT dept to call, but their job is to make your job easier and your department run better, so they should be more than willing to go to Meditech about this issue.
If there is no practical dictionary based solution, the label itself could be modified to contain selection logic based on anything in the order. So the label could be called by Meditech as part of a cart run and could suppress all printing (because all the pills can be UD packaging) or could print N labels because the dose indicates that you’ll need N bulk dispensed pills.
Meditech PHA labels are actually custom “reports” that are built with a proprietary tool called the NPR report writer, and the reports can be modified by someone in your IT dept to provide additional functionality. Usually the customization is just done to provide the customized layout or specific data fields you want, but it can included additional selection logic.
Sometimes the logic you need involves programming inside the NPR report, but that is also possible, using the Meditech proprietary programming language.
Hope this helps. If you are a new Meditech site and are on their new 6.0 (a/k/a M-AT) platform, good luck. All that I’ve said applies to all three Meditech platforms, Magic, Client Server and 6.0.