fencepost
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 2,314
- Location
- Schaumburg, IL
Medisoft. I suspect it was last updated for Y2K (they had a floppy with "Y2K fix" on a note).
One interesting thing is that apparently it's not actually built to know what's a valid ICD-9 code (numeric) so they're actually able to use ICD-10 codes (alphanumeric) with it. Apparently their outside billing processor is taking what they send (manual export to a text file, then go to the processor's website on a Windows 7 PC and upload that file each day) and doing whatever conversion or expansion is required before passing along to payers.
I'm honestly not sure if this is better or worse than a former customer some years back who was using an ophthalmology vertical-market system called PRISM. PRISM didn't understand networks. PRISM understood serial. Connections to it were via serial expansion cards that broke out to multiport "PODS" with 6 or 8 ports each, and each connection had a single-character ID (A-Z0-9 minus a few reserved ones). I think it was using Wyse 50 or Wyse 60 terminals (possibly emulating an IBM terminal), plus printers with serial connections. That wasn't actually as bad as it might sound, because we got them onto Terminal Services and used a couple of Digi PortServers (now ConnectPort TS) for connections. That was important because they had multiple locations, and those dedicated serial lines were being dropped by AT&T as fast as they could.
I will note that this serial wonderland was in the mid-2000s, not in the dark ages.
One interesting thing is that apparently it's not actually built to know what's a valid ICD-9 code (numeric) so they're actually able to use ICD-10 codes (alphanumeric) with it. Apparently their outside billing processor is taking what they send (manual export to a text file, then go to the processor's website on a Windows 7 PC and upload that file each day) and doing whatever conversion or expansion is required before passing along to payers.
I'm honestly not sure if this is better or worse than a former customer some years back who was using an ophthalmology vertical-market system called PRISM. PRISM didn't understand networks. PRISM understood serial. Connections to it were via serial expansion cards that broke out to multiport "PODS" with 6 or 8 ports each, and each connection had a single-character ID (A-Z0-9 minus a few reserved ones). I think it was using Wyse 50 or Wyse 60 terminals (possibly emulating an IBM terminal), plus printers with serial connections. That wasn't actually as bad as it might sound, because we got them onto Terminal Services and used a couple of Digi PortServers (now ConnectPort TS) for connections. That was important because they had multiple locations, and those dedicated serial lines were being dropped by AT&T as fast as they could.
I will note that this serial wonderland was in the mid-2000s, not in the dark ages.
