If you are a Medical practice, who does the data in your Medical Software Belong to? Does the data in your medical software belong to your patient? Yes. Does the data in your medical software belong to you? In a very real sense, yes. You created it, you control it and you are responsible for it (under the new HIPAA regulations you could be fined or be sent to jail if you don’t adequately protect it). Does the data in your medical software belong to your software vendor? We don’t think so!

HCFA and other governing entities charge you with the responsibility to guard and protect any patient data that you touch; but whose data is it anyhow? Why should any software vendor be able to hold you hostage?
One of the things that we have come to appreciate about Medisoft software is its open database architecture philosophy. Medisoft offers you a variety of ways to get YOUR data into or even out of their databases.

1) ODBC Connectivity- Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) allows you to access your data using other ODBC compliant programs such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Crystal Reports, and many others. While there are many programs that are ODBC compliant, setting up and maintaining the drivers often requires a high level of technical expertise. In addition, writing to any billing database in this fashion can destroy its integrity and corrupt it beyond salvaging if done improperly. Writing back to a billing database using ODBC is not recommended unless you really, really know what you are doing. Even then it can be dangerous.

2) Medisoft Ports- Medical Software Tools has automated port utilities to import or export data into or out of the Medisoft database. These utilities allow us to import data from a standard comma delimited ASCII format into Medisoft. If you wish to migrate your data from another billing system to Medisoft call us for more information. If you believe that you have outgrown Medisoft and want to migrate your data to another system we can help you with that.

3) Medisoft Data Conversion– The technicians at Medical Software Tools have been reading and writing directly to the NDCHealth billing softwares and other databases for over ten years. Our programmers have years of experience in manipulating data and reading and writing data to billing systems.

Because it is difficult to be expert at every billing system on the market (there are thousands) we also have arrangements with contractors that specialize in many of the other popular billing systems on the market.

This is an EASY solution because Medical Software Tools handles the conversion for you. Normally, we do a trial conversion for you before you have to pay the full cost so that you can see for yourself that the data has been converted satisfactorily. In addition, Medical Software Tools and its contractors have already done conversions on a variety of Medical Billing Softwares and Electronic Medical Records systems so in many cases the conversion can be performed very quickly.

Who owns the data? Certainly medical data belongs to the patient, but when a medical provider renders services that data should be accessible to the provider. Don’t be held hostage by vendors. Choose wisely; it really is “your” data!

Mark Beans, MCSE, MCP+I
www.MedicalSoftwareTools.com