This document summarizes a hospital's vendor selection process in 1993 to replace their existing hospital information system. It describes how Meditech was selected over 9 other vendors after a rigorous evaluation process involving an RFI, on-site demonstrations, reference calls, user manual reviews, and contract negotiations. Meditech scored highest based on functionality, support, costs, stability, and unanimous preference by the hospital's departments. The document highlights both Meditech's strengths as well as weaknesses presented to the selection committee.
Product overview of Hosted Claims Manager and Denials IQ presented by HealthCo Information Systems and GE's EDI team. Discover how these two EDI product innovations can improve your reimbursement processes and get your paid faster.
Why should a health plan invest in integrated solutions when providers have more to gain? How to remove the risks of moving forward without an industry standard? Safe harbor investment? Is an all-payer/all-provider solution even possible today? How do I justify an investment in workflow automation and backend system integration? This is a webinar on extension of the successful conversation on claims attachments raised at WEDI National 2016. Three healthcare vendors came together to discuss how to overcome key challenges by leveraging current investments in a multi-vendor model.
TL 9000 Today & Benefit of PDR presented by Ken Koffman - JDSU. QuEST Forum developed the TL 9000 Quality Management System to meet the supply chain quality requirements of the worldwide telecommunications industry and is the telecom industry’s unique extension to ISO 9001:2015.
BackgroundYou have recently been promoted to Senior Consultant f.docxwilcockiris
Background
You have recently been promoted to Senior Consultant for the professional service firm, BUSI 2083 LLP thanks in part to the hard work in leading the engagement for your client Perfect Stitch. Your firm specializes in providing a wide variety of internal business solutions for different clients. After a weekend of celebrations from your promotion, a Senior Manager calls you into her office first thing Monday morning to help with a technology client who is making a tough decision about closing a plant.
Additional Information
Tiny Bits Digital (TBD) produces high end audio and television equipment. One of the company's most popular products is a high-definition personal video recorder (PVR) for use with cable and satellite television systems. Demand has increased rapidly for the PVR over the past three years, given the appeal to customers of being able to easily record programs while they watch live television, watch recorded programs while they record a different program, and save dozens of programs for future viewing on the unit's large internal hard drive.
A complex production process is utilized for the PVR involving both laser and imaging equipment. TBD has a monthly production capacity of 4,000 hours on its laser machine and 1,000 hours on its image machine. However, given the recent increase in demand for the PVR, both machines are currently operating at 90% of capacity every month, based on existing orders from customers. Direct labour costs are $15 and $20 per hour to operate, respectively, the laser and image machines.
The revenue and costs on a per unit basis for the PVR are as follows:
Selling price
$320.00
Cost to manufacture:
Direct materials
$50.00
Direct labour—laser process
60.00
Direct labour—image process
20.00
Variable overhead
40.00
Fixed overhead
50.00
Variable selling costs
20.00
240.00
Operating profit
$80.00
On December 1, Daniel Norris, vice-president of Sales and Marketing at ECD, received a special order request from a prospective customer, Fitch Limited, which has offered to buy 250 PVRs at $280 per unit if the product can be delivered by December 31. Fitch Limited is a large retailer with outlets that specialize in audio and video equipment. This special order from Fitch Limited is in addition to orders from existing customers that are utilizing 90% of the production capacity each month. Variable selling costs would not be incurred on this special order. Fitch Limited is not willing to accept anything less than the 250 PVRs requested (i.e., TBD cannot partially fill the order).
Before responding to the customer, Daniel Norris decided to meet with Diane Gadrick, the product manager for the PVR, to discuss whether to accept the offer from Fitch Limited. Excerpts from their conversation follow:
Daniel: “I'm not sure we should accept the offer. This customer is really playing hardball with its terms and conditions.”
Diane: “I know, but it is a reputable company and I suspect this is the way it typic.
Infosys – Returns Management Best Practices | AdvantagesInfosys
Infosys believes you need to find the right mix of technology, process change and savvy consulting. Infosys Returns Management Best Practices involves multiple parties, processes and applications
Product overview of Hosted Claims Manager and Denials IQ presented by HealthCo Information Systems and GE's EDI team. Discover how these two EDI product innovations can improve your reimbursement processes and get your paid faster.
Why should a health plan invest in integrated solutions when providers have more to gain? How to remove the risks of moving forward without an industry standard? Safe harbor investment? Is an all-payer/all-provider solution even possible today? How do I justify an investment in workflow automation and backend system integration? This is a webinar on extension of the successful conversation on claims attachments raised at WEDI National 2016. Three healthcare vendors came together to discuss how to overcome key challenges by leveraging current investments in a multi-vendor model.
TL 9000 Today & Benefit of PDR presented by Ken Koffman - JDSU. QuEST Forum developed the TL 9000 Quality Management System to meet the supply chain quality requirements of the worldwide telecommunications industry and is the telecom industry’s unique extension to ISO 9001:2015.
BackgroundYou have recently been promoted to Senior Consultant f.docxwilcockiris
Background
You have recently been promoted to Senior Consultant for the professional service firm, BUSI 2083 LLP thanks in part to the hard work in leading the engagement for your client Perfect Stitch. Your firm specializes in providing a wide variety of internal business solutions for different clients. After a weekend of celebrations from your promotion, a Senior Manager calls you into her office first thing Monday morning to help with a technology client who is making a tough decision about closing a plant.
Additional Information
Tiny Bits Digital (TBD) produces high end audio and television equipment. One of the company's most popular products is a high-definition personal video recorder (PVR) for use with cable and satellite television systems. Demand has increased rapidly for the PVR over the past three years, given the appeal to customers of being able to easily record programs while they watch live television, watch recorded programs while they record a different program, and save dozens of programs for future viewing on the unit's large internal hard drive.
A complex production process is utilized for the PVR involving both laser and imaging equipment. TBD has a monthly production capacity of 4,000 hours on its laser machine and 1,000 hours on its image machine. However, given the recent increase in demand for the PVR, both machines are currently operating at 90% of capacity every month, based on existing orders from customers. Direct labour costs are $15 and $20 per hour to operate, respectively, the laser and image machines.
The revenue and costs on a per unit basis for the PVR are as follows:
Selling price
$320.00
Cost to manufacture:
Direct materials
$50.00
Direct labour—laser process
60.00
Direct labour—image process
20.00
Variable overhead
40.00
Fixed overhead
50.00
Variable selling costs
20.00
240.00
Operating profit
$80.00
On December 1, Daniel Norris, vice-president of Sales and Marketing at ECD, received a special order request from a prospective customer, Fitch Limited, which has offered to buy 250 PVRs at $280 per unit if the product can be delivered by December 31. Fitch Limited is a large retailer with outlets that specialize in audio and video equipment. This special order from Fitch Limited is in addition to orders from existing customers that are utilizing 90% of the production capacity each month. Variable selling costs would not be incurred on this special order. Fitch Limited is not willing to accept anything less than the 250 PVRs requested (i.e., TBD cannot partially fill the order).
Before responding to the customer, Daniel Norris decided to meet with Diane Gadrick, the product manager for the PVR, to discuss whether to accept the offer from Fitch Limited. Excerpts from their conversation follow:
Daniel: “I'm not sure we should accept the offer. This customer is really playing hardball with its terms and conditions.”
Diane: “I know, but it is a reputable company and I suspect this is the way it typic.
Infosys – Returns Management Best Practices | AdvantagesInfosys
Infosys believes you need to find the right mix of technology, process change and savvy consulting. Infosys Returns Management Best Practices involves multiple parties, processes and applications
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
PHP Frameworks: I want to break free (IPC Berlin 2024)Ralf Eggert
In this presentation, we examine the challenges and limitations of relying too heavily on PHP frameworks in web development. We discuss the history of PHP and its frameworks to understand how this dependence has evolved. The focus will be on providing concrete tips and strategies to reduce reliance on these frameworks, based on real-world examples and practical considerations. The goal is to equip developers with the skills and knowledge to create more flexible and future-proof web applications. We'll explore the importance of maintaining autonomy in a rapidly changing tech landscape and how to make informed decisions in PHP development.
This talk is aimed at encouraging a more independent approach to using PHP frameworks, moving towards a more flexible and future-proof approach to PHP development.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
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Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
2. Big Win From 20 Years Ago
• We left off last week with an RFI from Brooks Memorial, a 200-
bed hospital in upstate NY, being issued to the 10 leading HIS
vendors back in 1993 to see how Meditechbeat them so often.
• Before we wasted our time & their money flying in demo teams
to frozen Dunkirk NY (located near Anchorage…), we reviewed the
RFI results to determine which of the vendors were:
– Large &stable enough to last the expected 10 year life cycle
– Had a strong NY state presence to meet regulatory needs
– Were affordable, in terms of capital, operating and TCO
– Had clients of our bed size, apps, interfaces & conversion
The results are summarized in the table on the following page.
• If you don’t recognize the acronyms for the vendors on thetop
row, then you didn’t read last week’s episode that described
them! You can find all these past episodes at hispros.com
3. 1993 Vendor RFI Responses
Compu First Medi-
CHC care Data GTE HBO HCS IBAX Keane tech SMS SDS
Years in
HIS biz 21 20 25 18 18 25 12 20 25 25 15
Revenue
in 000s $43,400 $23,200 ≈$200,000 ≈$60,000 $280,000 ≈$10,000 ≈$50,000 $90,000 $92,300 $470,000 ≈$14,000
# of
FTEs 260 215 1,031 222 1,814 75 582 244 1,105 4,000 148
Nearest
office Texas Virginia N. Carolina Phila. Pitts. New Jersey Florida New York Mass. New Jersey Iowa
# of US
(Not
clients 42 34 128 238 188 provided) ≈200 15 104 54 85
NY state
Clients 2 3 7 5 2 1 6 9 10 3 1
Hard- DG Aviion DEC DG Aviion DEC
ware HP, G30 9500 "Alpha" IBM AS/400 5240 IBM AS/400 DEC 5000 DG or DEC 4000/Alpha
Capital
Costs $984,624 $1,124,604 $650,750 $904,991 $1,375,306 $1,162,938 $1,496,000 $909,800 $1,335,000 $950,000 $824,082
Opera-
tingCost $131,516 $104,052 $86,268 $137,652 $126,325 $178,553 $125,880 $79,200 $148,200 $96,000 $77,765
5 year
TCO $1,642,205 $1,644,864 $1,082,090 $1,593,251 $2,006,931 $2,055,701 $2,125,400 $1,305,800 $2,076,000 $1,430,000 $1,212,906
10 Year
TCO $2,299,787 $2,165,124 $1,513,430 $2,281,511 $2,638,556 $2,948,464 $2,754,800 $1,701,800 $2,817,000 $1,910,000 $1,601,730
4. Winnowing the Field
• We presented these RFI resultsto our selection committee, with
the caveats in red ink for those vendors with weak responses: small
annual revenue, minimal NY presence, etc. Meditech’s only issue
was high capital costs, however CFO Ralph Webdale said he would
gladly pay top dollar if they turned out to be the best system!
• So we next scheduled demos at Brooks for the 6 RFI “winners,”
making each vendor follow the same agenda (1-2 hours per user
department) and grading each through a numeric checklist on:
– User-friendly GUI (or not), patient search,
reports, security, flexibility, report writer, etc.
The checklists also helped to guide the committee
into evaluating the system, rather than just liking
the “demo dollie (or dude)” with the nicest
personality, so totally irrelevant after the sale!
5. Brooks’ Demo Results
• And here, 20 years later, are the results, which took a
few thousand keystrokes to update from MS Works 1.0 to Excel 2012!
• As you can see, the
highest score went to
Meditech, but HBO and
CHC did pretty well too.
• An no one really stunk,
showing the committee
that all modern systems
beat their old SAINT…
• Next we made phone calls to the top 3 vendors, but a lot different
approach than the near-perfect “98.5” scores KLAS comes up with:
- Ours were peer-to-peer: RN to RN, biller-to-biller, IT to IT, etc.
- And not to “flagship” sites, but our bed size, state, version, etc.
- And scored with another thorough checklist, with these results:
6. Telephone Reference Calls
• Meditech led again, but only a tad ahead of HBO. It was
poor CHC who’s few users in NY state were only so-so…
• We’ve done
over HIS 150
searches by
now, and our
phone scores
are about 70%,
helping lower
end users’
expectations.
• The next step in our process hardly anyone ever does: look at the
user manuals before you buy! Paper binders were a pain to ship in
‘93, but today’s CDs and web sites are easily available. And you get
much lower scores than on any RFP “feature checklist” response!
7. User Manual Review
• You sure don’t get many “98.5” scoreshere either! Indeed,
some up-and-coming vendors don’t even have user doc…
• They claim their systems
are so user-friendly, no
manuals are needed!?
• (tell that to an RN on the
3rd shift trying to help a
physician figure out how
to DC a med via CPOE…)
• As you can see above, Meditech had superb user manuals back then,
HBO’s were pretty good, but CHC had a long way to go in this regard.
• So we pretty much had our two “finalist” vendors for the next steps:
- Site visits, once again peer-to-peer, with no sales “chaperones!”
- Detailed cost review, with over 10 pages per (poor) vendor
- And concurrent contract negotiations (no “VOC” beforehand)
8. Contract Questionnaire
• As you figured out by now, we don’t place much stock in an RFP
“Feature Checklist,” defined as a “Request For Prevarication.”
• One checklist we do make vendors fill out is for contract Ts & Cs.
Back in 1993, we had 25 items we drilled vendors on, such as:
– Sub-1-second system response times, or the vendor buys more hardware
– Veteran installers: 5 years in Healthcare, 2 with the vendor, 1 prior install
• By today, we have over 70 such nasty items on ARRA, ICD-10, etc.
• This is the one area where Meditech
did poorly, as illustrated on the right:
• The boys in Boston are just tough
negotiators, and we struggle to get
them togrant any concessions...
• At our next committee meeting, we
summed up all these scores & voted
9. Brook’s Committee Vote
• Here is how Brook’s 10 user departments ranked the 3 vendors;
we inverted their ranking for scores so the highestscore wins: 3
points to their first choice, 2 to runner up, and 1 for 3rd choice.
CHCFDCHBOCMeditech
Pharmacy 2 1 3
Data Processing 1 2 3
Human Resources 2 1 3
Radiology 3 1 2
Medical Records 2 3
Nursing 1.5 1.5 3
General Accounting 1.5 1.5 3
Laboratory 0.5 2 3
Nursing 1 2 3
Patient Accounting 2 1 3
Totals: 12.5 4 13 29
• No contest! Meditech just swept the vote except for Radiology
(maybe they had a deeper view?). It was so overwhelming, Ralph
called off the remaining steps in the process (site visits, etc.).
10. Meditech Recap
• So there you have it: how a handful of MIT grads formed a start-
up HIS vendor that swept the small to mid-range hospital market!
– Strengths: Satisfied clients (functionality & support), “Total
HIS” (financial & clinical systems), low operating costs (12% of
license fee/yr), and a stable management team/direction (no
acquisitions, C-Suite change, nor 90-day Wall Street panic).
– Weaknesses: High capital costs (you get
what you pay for?), proprietary data base
(tough interfaces – this ad is a lie!), and
rookie installers. Today, one might also
quibble about multiple product lines…
• Next week? We shift to the 6th ranking vendor of
today: GE Healthcare, and their roots in another
frozen northland – Burlington, Vermont. Any HIS
veterans who worked for “Burlington Data
Processing” please write: vciotti@hispros.com