HL7 Integration: One of the most extensively used application data standards

The present vibrant market conditions within healthcare persist to introduce new challenges to the security of health information. As the industry is quickly evolving, decision-making in the health information role is becoming by large a technological guessing game. Though laboratories and medical practices began to store their data in the computers, there was no single standard or system. This has led to numerous contrasting files, databases, interfaces and system types. Presently, the medical industry seems to be waking up to the significance of integrating their databases and interfaces.

There is a massive requirement in the healthcare industry for the integration engine, HL7 (Health Level Seven) interface, one of the most extensively used application data standards in the IT industry. HL7 is a standard series of pre-defined logical formats for healthcare data in the structure of messages to be transmitted among computer systems. It has been designed to help various file types and computer applications within the medical industry to communicate with each other. For easier understanding, HL7 is a technique for different medical industry providers to efficiently share data and talk with each other.

These days, most of the medical laboratories and service providers are moving to interface engines so as to help develop HL7 enabled applications that will allow for full communication with all of their partners like doctors office and hospitals. The HL7 basically acts as a router between the two Medicare providers.

The prime benefit of HL7 interface engine is that it simplifies the implementation of interfaces and reduces the need for custom interfaces. HL7 interface engines are, less complicated, more economical and faster. The HL7 interface also improves work flow by allowing medical professionals to focus on their core business activities and provide quality medical care. In place of writing specifications from scratch every point in time data needs to be sent between two systems, it can make reference to a standardized document that assist in providing a common understanding to both systems.

Essentially, HL7 integration has been and continues to be a blessing for various health care providers. Without having a structured standard for different systems and companies to communicate with each other there would be much confusion. Fortunately, by implementing HL7 Integration engine the pace of continued integration will boost manifold. This signifies that very soon, all of the files and medical records will be integrated to almost every medical records and database. This will facilitate the health care providers and doctors to access the information they call for in bid to make life-saving medical decisions.

smartData Enterprises has built its reputation with a tightly focused team in Healthcare Integration. As a result of the challenges in the health domain, smartData has expanded into health information security with the sound business model and strong core values. smartData Enterprises has been successful in developing HL7 interfaces and will work with your staff to guarantee the secure upload of completed reports. Today, we can produce results with excellence, and guarantee the direction our clients require in healthcare integration and health information security.

To help you with the healthcare integration and health information security for your business, please check out our website www.smartdatainc.com or get in touch with through phone, chat or e-mail.

Essentials of effective Business Communication

Choose the Right Communication medium

Choose the right communication method for each situation. For example, avoid using email to communicate urgent/sensitive issues. Use written communication to convey lists of information. Use diagrams and example to summarize complicated information.

Planning-Schedule and Prepare Thoroughly

Schedule your meeting in advance. This will ensure that you and your client have a suitable amount of uninterrupted time to speak.Also confirming the date and time of your meeting in email. Also we should the reminder. Once your meeting is scheduled, please take your time to prepare the agenda for the meeting that outline focus points.  Also share the agenda of meeting between each other and that will give an opportunity to fully prepare.

Be Punctual and Communication Apparatus Verification

You should setup the call apparatus 10 minutes before scheduled call. Client is very particular about their time. So, initiate the call on time.

Greeting

Greet the client respectfully at the start of call and be polite to client throughout the call respective of situation. Initiate the discussion as per the shared agenda point and discuss non-agenda points at end of call to be productive and save time. Also, confirm your understanding for the important and critical points.

Use proper/simple English

Don’t use Slangs or typical technical words during communication. It should be simple English, so other person can understand easily.  Recognize cultural differences in communication styles. Before you work with people from another country, take the time to investigate business practices in that area of the world.

Be a Good listener and no Unnecessary Interrupt

Listen carefully to other party and avoid interrupting the speaker with unwanted arguments. It limits your understanding of the situation.

Be proactive/attentive in the call

Keep acknowledging the client during the conversation to give him impression that we are keenly listening to his idea

Proofread your written communication

Check for spelling and grammar mistakes so that you fix them before distributing your information.   Written communication should be properly formatted.  Use a business email address with a proper signature in your email. Bifurcate your thoughts into points and the subject matter point wise. Highlight important/critical points.

Summarize Minutes of Meeting

Follow up with your client after meeting with a written message by summarize the minutes of call incorporating important points discussed. Also request the other party to confirm/add/correct us on our notes.

Feedback on routines basis

To maintain long -term relationships with your clients, we should ask them for their feedback for how things are going and how they feel about the service that we are providing. It can be accomplished by weekly release and touch base session with client.

Address problem

If client is unhappy then their complaints should not be ignored. This should be addressed at the earliest. The longer you wait to bring it up, the worse it will get.

Try a different communication method

If a problem with your client occurs from miscommunication then we should try a different method of communication. Such as if you are handling client by email then we schedule a phone call to see if that clears things up.

Little Important Learning from Managing Small Teams to Larger Ones

Given below are some of the important learning’s from my experience of growing the team of 5 people to 250+ team now and every growing still  

• Teamwork
• Art of Delegation
• Show Appreciation
• Take Hard decisions for Organization Benefit
• Effective communication

There are many more, but sticking to above ones, which I personally feel are the most important ingredients for managing a larger team

• Team Work  

 “T- together  E-Everyone  A-Achieves  M – More”.  To get the Best out of your team, you should always focus on team member’s strength and utilize them, instead of focusing on their weakness. When you work in team, you get diverse ideas and perspective, which often leads to creative solutions. While working in team, you also gets uncover answers that might not have occurred otherwise. Team encourages each other for task completion that works as a miracle. Teamwork makes everybody perform well and produce great results. With teamwork, individual risk taking capacity also increases along with ownership towards organization common goals. As the bigger tasks are being divided into smaller tasks, they are more manageable and give a sense of accomplishment to all individuals involved.

• Art of Delegation –

This is actually tough but highly essential, especially if you are moving ahead. You cannot have control of everything. To achieve BIGGER goals, you have to loose the sight of horizons. We all have confidence on our capabilities and hence we assume that we can only do piece of job much faster than him/her. But we all need to understand that its ONLY short term thinking. Following are the six steps for delegation, which yields great results:

1. Prepare – be clear on what you are expecting from the person. Take time to think
2.  Assign – hand over all the responsibilities with timing and budget to the person. Provide the tips/assistance, if required. Set your expectations clearly and be open to his/her questions
3. Confirm understanding – this is highly critical as while delegating we assume that other person understands what we mean.  Confirming the understanding will determine the success and failure of delegation.
4. Commitment – this is generally skipped by all of us. We all assume that other person has accepted the task. For successful handing over, commitment is very important.
5. Avoid Interruptions – Since we knew the subject much better than the other person, we tend to keep interrupting assuming we are assisting them. Think Over it! This could be annoying as well. Also, taking tasks back is a strict No-No
6. Accountability – Communication in delegation is the key. Therefore, reporting on progress is essential to be sure that work is moving in right direction.

• Show Appreciation 

This in a way motivates your people to give outstanding results.  We should never loose any chance to appreciate your people. This also tells your people, how much you care and value them.  Show appreciation for their hard work and contributions to organizations goals.  We should also provide opportunities for our people, where they can show their hidden talent. Employee recognition is important, to boost up his self-confidence. Appreciation makes people feel important and appreciated.  It is something we should not hide. So appreciation works best, when it is done in public. An effective leadership, people accomplish and achieve more than they may ever have dreamed possible.

• Take Hard Decisions for Organization Benefit

This is another important thing learnt. At times, maybe we personally do not agree to the decision but when it comes to bigger picture we need to take those tough calls.  Decision is right or wrong, that time will tell, but when situation comes, someone has to take the decision and usually its YOU.  Though, its good to weigh the pros and cons of all your decision but that should not delay the decisions. At times, decision are not well understood by your team, but believe me, your horizon is far much larger than your team, so believe in yourself. While taking decisions, follow your instinct. It will never misguide you.

• Effective communication

There are 3 ways on how we communicate i.e Oral, Written and Non-verbal. All three are important while communicating with your juniors in team or with your seniors.  To communicate effectively, we should also learn to listen. Hearing and Listening are two separate things. While communicating, try not to be judgmental or biased with our own beliefs. 

To conclude, I’m still practicing the above learning to the best of my capability, as the team is continuously growing from large to larger. Everyday is a new day and each day comes up with new challenges.

smartData’s POS software solutions for the Retail Business

Retail industry is on the rise with increased number of challenges faced by the owners. It has become more and more complex to become accustomed to changing business pictures for retailers who are always looking for new ways to increase profitability. Although the challenges of retail are unique, they can be addressed by equipping your business with the right tools that will make work easy and efficient. The best way of doing so is by installing POS software for retail.

No matter what kind of business you operate, may be a small shop, a supermarket or a restaurant, the POS systems are vital for the functioning of your business. Every retail business needs POS equipment as it makes the processes a whole lot easier. The significance of these systems in retail and hospitality business is crucial. The POS acts as a cash record over and above a computer. In effect, the POS can consist of multiple work-stations that comprise receipt printers, credit card terminals, display screens, server stations and hostess stations. Installing a POS system in a retail business surely leads to accuracy, convenience and time-saving.

You can never be wide of the mark with the decision to install POS system since it offers a lot of benefits to you and your business. In fact, the POS system has the ability to perform a multitude of functions and includes the following benefits:

• It’s easy and flexible to operate
• It has higher operational efficiency and efficient return management
• It helps in delivery tracking and wastage management
• It helps in improved customer satisfaction and service.
• It increases your revenue per square feet.
• It has lower operating cost
• It provides accurate information for crucial business decisions.
• It optimizes the inventory management

POS system software is positively attractive. They are a plug-and-play solution and incorporate all the basic hardware with the software preinstalled. The retail POS package usually include a monitor, terminal, keyboard, mouse, cash drawer, barcode scanner, card reader, receipt printer and retail software. The POS restaurant packages usually include a terminal, touch-screen monitor, cash drawer, card reader, receipt printer and restaurant software.

smartData Enterprises’ POS systems meet the challenging requirements of small, independent retailer to a large, multi-location retail chain. We offer the choice of deployment on various hardware and IT infrastructure. You may select the precise technology and benefits in terms of the operations, capital and operational expense, maintenance, security and support needs.  We provide complete secured and enhanced point of sales (POS) solutions.

Our retail POS software solutions are comprehensive retail business management solutions, which includes inventory management, accounts, trading and business intelligence for retailers who want to compete and thrive in the current challenging environment.

smartData’s POS software is one of the most secure retail business management solutions in the market today. We, at smartData, are regularly in the process of adding new features and upgrades to our POS products for our users.

To help you determine the best POS solutions for your business, please check out our website or get in touch through chat or e-mail.

For more information Visit www.smartdatainc.com or Write to smartData Enterprises at info@smartdatainc.net

Capability Maturity Model Integration

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI, registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University, is a process improvement approach. CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. Processes are rated according to their maturity levels, which are defined as: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, and Optimizing.

Currently supported version is CMMI Version 1.3

CMMI currently addresses three areas of interest and we fall under the CMMI-DEV area.

• Product and service development — CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV),
• Service establishment, management, — CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC), and
• Product and service acquisition — CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ).

Just to help all understand on the benefits of Process improvement. It enables organizations to mature and customers, suppliers, and employees would like to deal with organizations with mature characteristics.

Mature Organization	Immature Organization
Reliable	Un reliable with undefined output
Committed	May not meet commitments
Dependable as partner	Undependable with quality of output
Responds (After analysis)	Reactions without thinking.
Decisions are made using available data	Ignores the available data.
Learns from competition	Only believes that they are different
Plans and reassess plans	Planning is not their thinking
Prepared for risks (always had plan B/C)	Totally unprepared

CMMI leads the way to high performance through improved processes.

The management of the development and delivery of applications must be guided by quantitatively managed processes.

Performance comes from processes that are predictable, repeatable, and continuously improving in terms of product quality, cost and schedule performance, process performance, and customer satisfaction.

 “How to Start Things Right or Get things Right”

Effectively Coordinating, Communicating Upstream & Downstream in Management Hierarchy

We all hear that Communication is an art and also that it is an indispensable quality for success. We ought to communicate effectively to convey our thoughts, ideas and requests to both upstream and downstream in the Management hierarchy. However the difference being, that you need to convey and get things done from your juniors as per your requirements and discuss/revert/seek approvals from your seniors, the latter always needing more preparation. I feel there are 3 most important factors required for dealing with both hierarchies:

Positive attitude: To communicate effectively with anyone in the hierarchy, firstly it is most important to keep a positive attitude. With a positive attitude you are liked by your seniors and also your juniors respect and enjoy working with you.

Clarity in mind: In a conversation with your seniors, you must first build the thought in your mind and if time permits, then, pen it down for an effective discussion. With juniors, you can put your point to them, brainstorm and then reach a final conclusion as this also gives them a sense of involvement and ownership of the decision.

Brief and to the point: While dealing with seniors, it’s of utmost importance to keep your point of view in least of words without taking unnecessary time from their busy schedule. Better preparation will always ensure it.

Also, for a better coordination with your seniors, it is very important to keep your own checklists at the backseat and hear and help in your senior’s priorities first. Listening attentively is the most important part of Communication, which we forget and thus create confusions.

Timely decision making and reverting to all their requests/emails/phone calls help in maintaining a cordial professional relation in downstream as it affects their work.

Managing up always remains the priority and if everyone follows this rule, we won’t have any problem in downstream.

Challenge of converting academic meritocracy to real life meritocracy

Let us first understand the difference between the two situations: during education and at the workplace. Academics aims towards preparing us for real life. The environment it presents has most of the variables controlled. We are within the same/similar environment, interacting with almost the same group for a reasonably long duration, a defined syllabus, date sheets planned, etc. The surprise element is limited to surprise tests. However real life is a total surprise with limitless opportunities and unannounced challenges. This brings in the challenge for organizations to convert academic meritocracy to real life meritocracy at work.

While hiring majority of the organizations do keep note of a good academic record as it reflects qualities like intelligence, discipline and perseverance. However an individual may not be able to maintain the same level of meritocracy at work. Major reason for that may be the individual’s inertia towards the challenging environment, expecting things to be defined, predictable and choice based as earlier. There are few suggestions for individuals to overcome this challenge, although the list is not exhaustive:

• Keep learning: Sharpening the axe is as important in work as in academics. This is what helped in achieving academic meritocracy in first place.
• Explore: Unlike academics the syllabus is not defined so don’t limit the boundaries.
• Be open to change: At times the work assigned may not be as per interest of the individual. However real life situations demands for flexibility.
• Prioritize: It is important to understand what the priority in that situation is.
• Build on strengths: An individual cannot be excellent in all areas. One needs to build strengths to create value. In current times the dynamic workplaces create unique profiles that may also be cross functional rather than all individuals having the same set of responsibilities.
• Communicate effectively and develop good interpersonal skills: Success in work area is not just individual based. Co-curricular activities in academics do help in developing skills like teamwork and personality development. This however can become challenging in the workplace. Making a conscious effort at work is essential.
• Be Positive: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."― Albert Einstein. Things can be improved with efforts and a positive attitude.

Following points can be taken into account for creating an environment to foster success:

1) Individual differences: Realizing that every individual is different and needs to be dealt in a unique manner. This however does not suggest creating different rules for all.
2) Leverage on strengths: Recognizing strengths of an individual and building on it to create value in the system.
3) Career growth: To improve engagement in work the environment must encourage career growth of the individual.

To keep shining the star has to burn itself. We cannot rest on our past laurels in the quest of success. I would like to summarise the article with words of Sir Winston Churchill “Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. Courage is what counts. “

Software project- explicit and implicit requirement and there relationship

Software is an interesting piece (set of instructions to complete tasks) as an outcome of human efforts to build it. It's really a virtual thing which can do wonders to improve the human life and makes the work routine more interesting and joyful. End user of the software is "generally" interested in the perfection of the job the software can do and achieve its objectives whereas it's hard to understand and explain the background activities involved in building a software which passes the following characteristics. Each of these characteristics have their own list of implied needs.

1. User Friendly
2. Accurate
3. High Performing
4. Scalable
5. Reliable
6. Follows Industry Standards (global
7. Security
8. Robust (Fault tolerance

Clients/Prospects who are mostly the business owners and provide the set of requirements in various forms to try and explain the core requirements of the software to be developed and leave the minute details of the technology to the subject experts (programmers). The customers try to provide as much details as possible but purely from the end user of the product and not as "programmer". That's the major challenge programmers face when they deal with customers, because the programmers are so much dependent on the explicit requirements that they forget about the implied needs of any software. Most of the times customers will only specify the core business requirements of the software which "explicit requirements" and achieving those requirements is must but at the same time programmers have to use experience and knowledge of global standards which are expected out of any software and more specifically the unsaid/implied needs of software in that specific business domain.

As an analogy when we buy Microwave Owen for our kitchen, we talk about it's capacity, heating features, conviction enabled, etc. But do we ever ask "explicitly" that the said device (Microwave) shouldn't give electric shock when operated? Answer is "NO" because we take it for granted as implied specifications of that machine.

Similarly there are lots of such implied needs of software which needs to be integrated "by default" and doesn't have to be mentioned anywhere in the requirements or documents but they are part of deliverables and doesn't account for unnecessary arguments or extension of scope with customers.