NoteBuilder News

Quick Treatment Goal Creation

Have you ever been in the midst of doing notes and want to add a goal to a particular client’s Service Plan. In the past, since you had to leave the ‘NoteBuilding’ area and navigate to ‘Treatment Planning’, you file this in your mental ToDo list to be completed once you have finished the list of notes you are working on… and subsequently forget to do it.

So the key to increasing our mental health, as well as more adequately serving client needs, is to be able to put the note on hold, do the goal from within the NoteBuilding area, and pick right up on finishing notes.

Watch a two minute tutorial explaining how to do just that by CLICKING HERE.

As with most great ideas, this was requested by one of the merry band of NB users and we thank her for adding to the utility of the program. If you have ideas for improving the program, making documentation easier or more audit proof, email us so we can consider how that would fit into the gestalt of the program.

Interagency Collaboration

The murder might well have been prevented. Not with more phones tapped, or a quicker response from a SWAT team. We are talking about mundane things: If only the fax hadn’t been misplaced. If only the phone tag hadn’t gotten ridiculous. If only the overworked staff in the two collaborating agencies had a way of sharing information before it reached its expiration date; giving and receiving a bit more detail, a lot more quickly/easily.

The buzz words being flung around: Today’s leading government agencies embrace the use of instant, actionable information, frictionless processes and optimized operations as strategic advantages. The reality: we need to collaborate at a level that leverages information traditionally siloed within an agency. Information that could be the difference between life and death, successful outcomes or continued psychosocial impairment. The information should flow like water to where it is needed. Often, to the staff creating and/or receiving the information, current systems feel like carting cement in wheelbarrows.

The tutorial shows a solution that linked an agency providing substance abusing ex offenders, case management and counseling. For a decade this agency has been using NoteBuilder for documentation. The collaborating agency was Probation who needed, among other things, to keep tabs on what services the client was accessing. This info is available through a ‘Portal’ on the information that is in NoteBuilder. NoteBuilder is smart and has a learning curve. The portal is rather dumb, straightforwardly allowing probation officers to get/send information without having to learn another system.

For those familiar with Twitter you can see our debt to them. For anything more than 140 character ‘tweets’, PHI can be imported into the client’s record as PDF, DOC, XLS or TXT for either agency to access.

The tutorial is here. I hope having a visual representation of the process might help you in your desire to develop true collaborative relationships with other entities…

File Import Function/More intuitive dialogs

For February we made several changes intended to make the program less cryptic, more intuitive. I was asked why it took ten years to make these changes, and I believe it’s because it becomes so normal to run through things that you get blind to how a new user might hit a snag and have to jump through all kinds of mental hoops to get to the next step. So we’re cleaning things up.

1) Take for instance the process of adding a client. We presented a dialog box and asked for an ID. Folks coming over from Public Mental Health are used to having IDs assigned to consumers. But for many there was some question about the why’s and the how’s of Unique IDs. We’ve made the process less crytic by asking for a first and last name, gender and birthday. This is the minimum data needed to begin adding notes for a person. With this data we added a button called ‘Suggest ID’. Folks who want to roll their own can use whatever ID scheme they want, and folk who don’t want to think about Unique IDs can just use the one that is suggested. Hopefully that eliminates one barrier to getting on with the process.

2) Creating a 90801 will soon be (we are putting it on this weekend) cleaner with a new button called ‘Quickr’ (under ‘Finish’ button) that pops up the actual page for viewing. So when you’re banging data in and you wonder what it looks like on the page you can choose Quickr and go back and forth through the pages quite easily. You can also fill out things on those pages if you wish. So when learning the art of documenting a Diagnostic Assessment, you have another option. If you forget which button brings up a particular section is you can go right to the page and type there.

3) There is an agency going after CARF Certification. CARF reps thought they should  pdf all the paper in their medical records and get that into a database for all to access. They asked if that capability would be possible in NB so we added it. Quite simple to use and I hope all will use your imagination and consider how it might help your work-flow.

There is a movie about these changes up on the Training page or you can watch it by Clicking Here.

The Perfect Cup of Coffee

TOOLS

First of all, coffee tools need to meet several criteria. Ease of use (as another blogger noted, you have not had coffee yet, so simpicity is required), unbreakable, forgiving, easy to clean, flexible enough to play with all the coffee beans out there, but consistent enough so when caffeined goodness is dialed in you can enjoy perfection time after time. The first tool is the Aerobie AeroPress which is the only coffee maker meeting all criteria. You can read the reviews which say this hunk of plastic rocks. It has exceeded my expectations and, after a lifetime of bitter coffee from a variety of home coffee makers and commercial vendors, it has delivered the goods. My aeroPress came from ThinkGeek via a Christmas gift certificate from daughter Anna.

Second, the water you use needs to be a certain temperature (I didn’t know this until I read the AeroPress stuff). On one forum the poster, Goldilocks, said that the water shouldn’t be too hot or too cold but… well you know the rest. So how do we get that easily?

I had been thinking about the Aerobie but couldn’t conceive an efficient way of getting the water at the right temp without a lot of fuss.

I was introduced to the Sunbeam Hot Shot on a visit to my parents house in CA. They have  the ancient model, similar to image, but the top is missing and there is a patina of dried beverage drips; IOW its charming. Coming from a strict kettle on the stove tradition, I was enamoured with the hotShot’s ease of use and speed. Stumble to the sink, find and fill a mug, get the water into the top ( I have kept the top on even though it means flipping the lid up) and find the Earl Grey within the 30 seconds it takes to get the water to temperature.

So when I returned to NC, I went on eBay and obtained one, a wedding present from the 80’s placed in a newlyweds attic to age. With that provenance I was willing to go to 12 bucks but snagged it for 10.

COFFEE

meh: A&P Breakfast Blend, KrispyKreme Bold, various and sundy blends from Fresh Market. Allie came home from Wally World with a bag of Juan Valdez coffee. Its balanced, whatever that means, but more importantly I think it is ground perfectly for the aeroPress. It took several mornings to dial it in but I have found Nirvana.

TECHNIQUE

Use a good sized hand thrown ceramic mug to get the water to the hotShot. Clean up a dried used filter (the 350 they send with the aeropress are going to be part of the legacy I pass on to my heirs), screw it on the aeropress and place it on the mug.  Use 3/4 of a scoop of the JuanValdez. Use a plastic one cup measure to get the water to the aeroPress and stir with the official aeroPress stirrer for 10 seconds. Get the rest of the water in. Press it slowly (20,30 seconds). Unscrew the bottom, peel the filter off, put it on something absorbent to dry, push the puck of used coffee into the compost pile, and rinse aeroPress off. Put in whatever contaminants you like in your coffee and do your notes on NoteBuilder.

Bele Chere

Going to Asheville this weekend to visit children. Turns out it is Asheville’s street festival weekend.

If anyone near Asheville wants to get together and discuss NB give me a call or twitter me.

Other than that we are spending our time working on a new website, trying to get a handle on how to present NB as more than just doc creation. I would like to appeal to the same people who would search Wikipedia rather than trudge to their library to look in an encyclopedia. People who prefer buying music or book at Amazon rather than show up at a brick and mortar store. As the world goes digital having all clinical info on the web is just the way we live. Leaning in the direction of ‘your external clinical brain’ as the frame.

Dragon Naturally Speaking v9.0

Just got a report from clinician who states the voice recognition program works well with NB. Her assessment: ‘Very Cool’.

In other news we are bogged down on the new website design. Have a good home page but we are laboring over several of the others. Hope to pull it together this month but somewhat dependent on the muses.

We are pleased that the current feature set seems to be working for both private practice and Community Support/Agencies. Getting our heads out of the code has meant we can spend some time introducing it to some other companies.

NC PCP Update

We have just finished upgrading the North Carolina Person Centered Plan. It is now possible to add a second short range goal to a long range objective. You can view a video tutorial about the upgrade HERE. Apologies for the audio on the tutorial, Camtasia let me down. I think if there is too much activity on the video track, the audio is distorted when the swf is produced. I guess we need to move over to Macs, iMovie, etc. Hopefully, there is enough audio coming through to give a sense of how the upgrade works.

The other task for this month: modernizing our website. The intent is to make it easier for clinicians to understand what NB is about. For existing customers, we can leave behind the paper invoices and receive credit card payments. There is also an ‘affiliate’ program that allows you to get some credit for other professionals you refer to NB.

New Interactive Progress Note Demo

We have just put up an interactive demo that lets you log on and build a note. It shows off the program much more adequately than the video tutorials. You can go to the website and click the ‘Try it today’ graphic. Or Click Here

We have hopes of getting demos up for Group Notes, Treatment Plans and 90801s.

Whats in the pipeline for April

The next update will be on April 11/12 in the wee hours of the morn. We will be adding: 

Correspondence Module: Create Letters, Signing Forms, and Information Sheets. You can see some examples of what this is about here. I am soliciting some letters for the sample letters. If you have some good ones that you regularly send out, email me a copy and I’ll add them.

Encrypt PDFs: You can now encrypt any PDF you create in NB to send it via email. Will save a lot of trips to the fax machine. 

Add Actual Time to Note: Until now you could only put the duration of a service on a note; e.g. 29 minutes. You can now put actual time; e.g. 29 minutes (1:30 PM - 1:59 PM). If you set duration and start time it figures out the end time. Change duration and end time changes (for the math impaired). Preview the NB layout on which it will be used (Services) here.

That’s it.

UPDATE: April 14 - The changes are in place. Along with a nice update to the spellchecker.