Category: Update Blog

This is from our archives. I think 1985. Our first DOS version. It all fit on a 1.2 meg floppy disk. We originally developed this on a Kaypro machine that had a 10meg hard drive. The first installation was in Atlnata, at the office of Dr. Gene Sparlin, closely followed by our.second installation in the office of Dr. Dan Sullivan. From there, we jumped to NY in 1984 where HandyWorks was rewritten from the ground up.

Mailing out disks and updates was quite a chore back then, prior to the internet.  Our first website, captured by the wayback machine is here.

• HandyWorks will check this website to see if a later version is available. And if so, you’ll get a gentle nag!
• Procedure codes marked as Favorite are now preferentially sorted in transactions.
• Patient age calculation is improved in narratives.
• Diagnosis in Letter now works properly.

For some reason, msaccess does not allow a form printscreen to work in an expected manner. So we added a simple way to make that happen.

In addition, we changed the behavior of the find box in patient data to NOT go into the last name field. Some users were not seeing that the field was highlighted and were typing over the last name.

Finally, a new Place of Service (residential treatment facility) on the Transaction Screen

Refactoring code lets things run faster and smoother. And that’s what this update is about, plus a few more good quotes to entertain.

So there are no “real” changes here, except a few minor touch-ups in places where, behind the scenes, the code was inelegant.

For the last 17 years, Medicare insisted that all dates on a HCFA be PRINTED with 4 digit years. (Electronic claims are not affected.) But according to one of our users in Ohio, now they want ALL DATES to have 2 digit years. While this can be changed in the HCFA preferences setting, it will not (currently) affect birth dates. Our October update will fix that, specifically and only for Medicare.

If you are having a problem with dates in printed HCFA Medicare forms, we can fix that for you individually.

Prior to this September update, if you had special margin settings for your reports, you would have to manually change them. From this point forward, HandyWorks will save these settings in a file on each machine. When a new upgrade is detected, HW will read those settings and restore your margin settings to what they used to be.

While we have streamlined the process of printer selection for ChargeItPro and X-Charge, these still have to be changed them manually.

Please note that this upgrade will not work if you are (heaven forbid!) running MS Access 2000!

 

In the August 18th, 2017 update to Office 365, Microsoft broke your scrollbar. Not even an apology. There are two options.

1. Revert to an earlier version by following these steps or
2. Wait for Microsoft to fix it with the next upgrade (whenever that might be).

 

1. In the Main Switchboard, Click Add-Ins, Utilities and Repair HWDATA. You can try to repair the data when the calendar is running slowly.
2. When Handyworks won’t open and you keep getting the message: “Point me to the location of your data”, it likely means that your hwdata is corrupt. In the past, you would have to exit the program and manually try to repair the data. BUT NO MORE! Now, when you get the “Point to me” message more than once, HandyWorks will ask if you want to try to repair the data. If you say “OK”, repair will be attempted, and if successful, you will get another attempt to connect to your data. If the repair fails, you will be prompted to call tech support.

And always, for your own sake, have recent backups. For as we all know, “stuff” happens.

• Finalized the interface in the duplicate patient merge module. No longer is it possible to do it wrong! – Thanks Eve
• The “Authorized Through” report was asking for unneeded financial parameters (fixed) – Thanks Stu.
• The automatic quit after 3 hours of inactivity was hanging on some machines (fixed!)
• The zip code box in carriers was made a “tad” wider. (it was too small for zip+4)
• The Upgrade link was fixed. And a redirect was set for the old website to handle older upgrades as well.
• Printing or viewing the appointment calendar also creates a CSV file “MyAppointments.csv”. This is for those of you brave enough to use an external reminder service.

Over the years, we have seen how offices have created multiple patient accounts when in actuality, the offices should have created multiple cases (for that one patient) since it was the same person each time. We have created a new module that solves this problem. It is accessed from the patient data screen by clicking on the tool icon on the top left. Just follow the instructions on the screen.

We fixed the graphing issue in the new statistics module so it presents a better bell curve.

We added some code to electronic billing that allows the ansi ebill creation to follow the HCFA preferences rule for filling box 32A. There is only one user with this situation, and only for Medicare claims, but it makes sense to make the rules you choose to apply in more places.