MS4 BACKUP REPORTING UTILITY
by Brandon Wiley
IT systems, even the best managed ones, sometimes fail, and in the event of a failure, the
patient needs to have his/her care needs met in an unaffected manner and the patient’s
safety and level of care cannot be compromised.
When a facility makes the decision to begin charting clinical values online as opposed to
documenting in an actual paper chart, ongoing access to the stored data, especially in the face
of a computer and/or network failure, becomes a paramount concern.
Most facilities print out and place the cumulative online documentation in the chart at
day-end, so that it will remain a part of the permanent medical record, but what happens if the
system goes down in the middle of the day? You’d still have access to the paper chart
containing everything from yesterday and older, but all the data entered on the current day
will be unavailable to you until the system is restored.
Siemens has provided MS4 users a utility, the Backup Reporting Utility, to help prevent any
patient safety or continuity of care issues from developing in the case of a technical
difficulty / outage. This utility runs on a PC that has connectivity to the MS4 system, and
at user defined intervals, will take a snapshot of each qualifying patient’s data, which
can then be stored on either a local device or a remote network location, so it is available in
the event of a system or network outage.
A few key decisions that need to be made by a facility implementing this utility are:
- What data is currently stored in the Clinical Repository which I would need to have
real-time access to in the event of a system outage, to maintain the continuity of care?
- How much of the selected data do I need, i.e. how far back do I wish to look during each backup?
- What patients will I include in the running of the utility?
- How often do I want this utility to run?
- Where do I want to store this information?
- How will I access/distribute this backed-up information if the system is down?
To implement this utility, a few steps need to take place:
- A flowsheet must be created, containing the subset of results that you wish to back
up. These are typically limited to key vital sign and Intake/Output observations, to limit
the burden placed upon the system each time this utility runs.
- The configuration file (UserInf.txt) must be created using the configuration utility
(UserInf.exe). This utility will allow the designation of the key settings:
- A valid user name / password for use with the running of the utility, as it logs
onto the system behind the scenes to retrieve the data.
- The Entity number of the facility for which the data is being retrieved, in the
case of a multi-entity installation.
- The name of the flowsheet, created for this utility.
- The Report code, which matches back to the MS4 report builder tool, and tells the
system which report format to use while generating the .PDF files.
- The output folder, where the report will be stored.
- The number of hours back for which you wish the data to be collected.
- The nursing station(s) for which you wish the data to be collected.
- The flag for whether or not to delete the previous documents from the output folder.
- The flag for whether or not to run in a diagnostic ‘debug’ mode.
- The Executable file must be installed on a local device
- The Executable file must be scheduled to run, utilizing the Windows Task Scheduler tool.
When the executable runs, it logs into the system, gathers the designated data, and
generates a .PDF file for each patient with the following naming convention:
AAAA_BBB_CC_CCYYMMDD_HHMM.PDF.
• AAAA – Nurse Station
• BBB – Room Number
• CC – Bed Number
• CCYYMMDD – Current Date in CCYYMMDD format
• HHMM – Current Time
It is recommended for a truly available report, that these files be stored in a location
that has a local printer attached to it, so reliance upon the network is not needed to print
the report, in the event of a complete system outage.
If you would like more information on this topic or other MS4 subjects, please contact us
at vcs@getvitalized.com or call our corporate
offices 610-444-1233.