Professional FAQ


What is the purpose of HHG Professional?
How do you do it ?
What are the chances that HHG Professional will mess up my MIS files ?
Is it legally and ethically okay to copy data out of the MIS and use it in this way ?
Are there times when it doesn't work?
How long does it take to set up?
How long does it take to refresh data to HHG Professional data files?
How often should we refresh data?
How much work will we have to do to get things set up ?
What training is included ?
Why not buy a report writer and create reports ourselves?
What if we later need more training ?
What support is available ?
Do we need to buy any other software to operate HHG Professional ?
What can we expect in terms of upgrades ?
Will I lose all my data if I later change MISs ?
Can I customize HHG Professional with other variables from my MIS ?
I like graphs; how does HHG Professional support them ?
How does OASIS fit in ?
Is the license for just one machine ?

What is the purpose of HHG Professional?
HHG Professional is intended to increase the use of objective data in the management of home health agencies. It takes advantage of the variety of data found in agency billing and OASIS systems and provides tools that increase access to that data and enable users to organize it and make sense of it. It is our belief that creative use of this data is an affordable strategy for strengthening your performance improvement efforts and insuring that you are meeting the standards of governmental entities, payers, and accrediting bodies. It is a vital ingredient of any strategy for thriving under Prospective Payment.

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How do you do it?
We develop an interface which allows you quickly copy data from your MIS and OASIS system. We provide you with detailed instructions for the operation of these export procedures and provide you with training so that you can periodically refresh the data in HHG Professional. We also guide you through the software installation and setup, working with you to "map" your agency-specific categories for such things as reason for discharge, source of referral, etc. to the generic categories provided by HHG Professional.

Once HHG Professional is installed, you use the same friendly, fast interface for querying data that is used by all HHG Professional agencies.

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What are the chances that HHG Professional will mess up my MIS files?
None! The Manager, Inc. uses processes provided by your MIS vendor to create new files which contain copies of a subset of your MIS data. These files are then copied to a separate HHG Professional sub-directory where they are reorganized to work with HHG Professional. HHG Professional never writes to your MIS files!

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Is it legal and ethical to copy data out of the MIS and use it this way?
The data in your MIS is yours, not the vendors'! Most vendors provide you with a means to copy data from the MIS for use in spreadsheets or a database. HHG Professional is one such database. Most likely, when you purchased your MIS, your vendor promoted this feature as an aspect of their product to ensure that you would not be limited to the reports they designed.

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Are there times when it doesn't work?
Yes. Although most vendors provide this export capability, some do not. Furthermore, a vendor may offer this capability as an added feature rather than as part of the core product. Our ability to make HHG Professional work depends on the features you have purchased. We will help you to determine early the feasibility of using HHG Professional. You pay us nothing if we cannot make it work!

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How long does it take to set up?
Our goal is to complete the installation in two weeks. We work with you to develop an implementation schedule, which will take into account the availability of your MIS staff and the experience we have previously had with your particular MIS vendor.

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How long does it take to refresh data to HHG Professional data files?
The time needed to accomplish this task varies from site to site. It depends on the report capability of your MIS, the amount of data you have, and the power of your equipment. Generally, it takes a few hours for the import, including the time needed to copy data from your MIS and the time needed in HHG Professional to convert those files to the HHG Professional format.

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How often should we refresh data?
We recommend that you import new data at least once a week. The import plan you develop for your particular agency, however, will depend on how quickly you enter data into your MIS and on the kind of questions you wish to ask of HHG Professional. Generally speaking, HHG Professional is used to address broad performance issues rather than to monitor specific day-to-day details. However the OASIS error checking tools now available in Professional may lead you to refresh your data more frequently.

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How much work will we have to do to get things set up?
Someone from your agency needs to be available to talk about your agency's structure and any aspects of your MIS that may be unique. You must provide a liaison who will know your system and be able to track things down. Generally speaking we expect this to require only a few hours.

Once HHG Professional has been installed, those who are going to use it will need to allow time for training.

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What training is included?
We will provide six hours of web based training as a part of the installation of HHG Professional. The training is of two types:

1. That which is directed at those who will be building queries in HHG Professional. This training focuses on operating HHG Professional to produce reports and gets into how to set criteria, pick from lists, set date ranges, etc. As we demonstrate the features of HHG Professional, we use examples based on your questions. We provide tutorials, and suggest activities you can undertake to broaden the range of issues to which you might apply HHG Professional in your agency.

2. The second type of training is for those who have the responsibility for periodically updating the HHG Professional files. It focuses on the mechanics of creating export files in your MIS and on importing them into HHG Professional.

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Why not buy a report writer and create reports ourselves?
It is very likely that you have someone on staff or in your community who would be able to extract data from your MIS and organize it using an off-the-shelf spreadsheet or database. Many agencies do this and have sophisticated processes for massaging their billing data. It is not cheaper, however. With HHG Professional we are able to share across agencies the cost of the development and upgrading of an intuitive, fast and friendly query interface. If you do this on your own, someone will have to master the esoteric naming and coding systems used by your vendor to store data. You will also need to master the complex processing of multiple visits for each patient. With HHG Professional, for example, you can quickly determine by the category of diagnosis, the patients who had a certain number of home health aide visits during a given two-month period. If, after you look at the results, you decide you want to see this list just for patients from a particular hospital or physician or age range or admission period or whatever, you can make the revisions and have the new report in five minutes. HHG Professional is able to generate a nearly infinite array of reports.

Other advantages of using HHG Professional rather than a homebuilt system are:

  1. The query interface is so friendly that many individuals in your organization can build their own reports to address their questions. This reduces the demands on your information system IS staff.
  2. Errors are inevitable in programming. When you use HHG Professional, users benefit from the extensive debugging, which has occurred at test sites and other agencies.
  3. When we install HHG Professional, you get the benefit of our extensive perspective. It is not uncommon to identify errors in coding or in data entry and to help get them corrected. When they are corrected, the overall quality of your MIS is improved.
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What if we later need more training?
We will contract for additional training if you determine it is needed. Furthermore, you are welcome to suggest topics for training to be incorporated into our web based tutorials.

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What support is available?
The purchase of HHG Professional includes eight hours of phone support. If you have questions about how to run a report or if the data looks wrong to you, if you have technical questions about the operation of HHG Professional or broad questions about the interpretation of data, please call. Additional support time may be purchased if necessary, but eight hours will go a long way. Also, we will not count against the eight hours any time spent resolving errors in our installation of HHG Professional.

We are prepared to communicate by phone, email, fax and the US Mail. If we identify a bug in your installation we can usually fix it by accessing your system via a remote hookup or by sending you a corrected program file via the Internet.

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Do we need to buy any other software to operate HHG Professional?
No. Professional is installed with a "run-time" version of Visual FoxPro.

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What can we expect in terms of upgrades?
The general model under which HHG Professional is distributed is that it will operate the same in all agencies. As agencies get more experience with HHG Professional, there will be suggestions for new reports or enhancements for existing reports, ideas about other data to be added, and requests to be able to organize data in additional ways. When HHG Professional is changed for one agency, it will be changed for all. It is difficult to estimate the frequency with which these upgrades will occur. As the installed base of agencies grows, we expect that upgrades will be distributed at least twice a year to respond to suggestions and federal changes.

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Will I lose all my data if I later change MISs?
No, in fact without HHG Professional, when an agency changes from one MIS to another, the new MIS is usually initialized with starting balances and current patients and access to your history (except for the hardcopy) is lost. It is then a year before a new useful history is available. With HHG Professional you can avoid this loss. Because HHG Professional uses the same file structure for agencies using various MISs, data captured under one vender's product can be merged if desired, with data entered into another. In fact, the use of HHG Professional insures that you will not lose your data history.

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Can I customize HHG Professional with other variables from my MIS?
Yes. Professional enables you to export your data to a spreadsheet or a database where you can combine it with other data available within your agency

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I like graphs; how does HHG Professional support them?
In recent years it has become astonishingly easy to produce graphs in spreadsheets such as Excel. Most agencies have at least one person on staff who is adept at building graphs. HHG Professional allows you to take advantage of this skill. Whenever you create a report, you can save it to a file in a format used by Excel, Lotus, or many other spreadsheets or databases. You can then start up Excel (or whatever), open this new spreadsheet, and build a graph just as you would have if you had built the spreadsheet yourself. There's no need to reenter the data.

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How does OASIS fit in?
OASIS is a natural complement for HHG Professional. It provides data for calculating patient outcomes. When connected with the "process" data in HHG Professional, it allows you to really study your performance. Professional has a full array of OASIS query and analysis tools.

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Is the license for just one machine?
No. Your agency is free to use HHG Professional on as many PCs or networks as desirable so long as it is used in the normal conduct of your particular agency's business.

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