Aaron Berdofe, MHI – Health Informatics

Dearest Meditech NPR Consultants,

Whether you come from the halls of consulting firms or Meditech interface vendors, you are my colleagues, my comrades.  It is without question that you undertake some of the most grueling and unappreciated work in all of the Meditech consulting world.  You have been given the most limited toolset and yet you still can build masterpieces.  However, I know your time is limited so let me get to the point:

Please stop building your entire reports in macros.

Now I know that you know that I know macros are a slightly more efficient way of building a report instead of having to use the painstaking picture and field method.  Sometimes I even have to stop myself from going straight macro, but here’s the thing: most of your clients’ inhouse NPR report writers don’t know how to create or modify your macros.  I can’t tell you how many of your reports I’ve had to recreate in an easier-to-maintain format, just so a client would be able to potentially change the report after I’ve left.  A very high percentage of Meditech support staff in general do not come from technical backgrounds.  The same goes for NPR report writers.  And even if they came from technical backgrounds, we’re all aware that most of that knowledge has to be thrown away or at least contorted into the world of Meditech.

I get that the whole point of making them incomprehensible to the people who have to maintain them is to keep them coming back for more.  It’s business, right?  I think we can all agree though that making minor updates to reports isn’t really worth your time.

Xs and Os,

Aaron