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The Art of DR Auditing . By Acmeware, Inc. Edward Chisam – Senior Consultant. Course Overview. Our Experience with Auditing Writing your own Audits DR Auditor Task Management. Lots of Examples. Examples are derived from real problems experienced by our clients
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The Art of DR Auditing By Acmeware, Inc. Edward Chisam – Senior Consultant
Course Overview • Our Experience with Auditing • Writing your own Audits • DR Auditor • Task Management
Lots of Examples • Examples are derived from real problems experienced by our clients • Some examples have been simplified for purposes of this discussion • We will provide tools demonstrated in this session to all those who are interested in them via e-mail
Acmeware’s experience with Auditing • Glen was the manager at MEDITECH responsible for development of the DR product • Intimately involved in original design decisions • Has written audits, reports, and applications against DR while at Acmeware • Ed was a senior developer in DR at MEDITECH • Lead developer for the DR Manager product • Has run numerous audits using DR Auditor
The MEDITECH Auditor MEDITECH is working on its own Auditor of DR. Drawbacks to it at the current time include: • Slow performance • Limited choices of sample rates • Uses same routines as initial load to populate sample tables • By definition there is a lack of independent objectivity
Developing your own Audits Possible approaches that might be tried: • NPR Report Writer • Use Report Writer to save DPM subscripts to a file • Import the file into a SQL table using Data Transformation Services • Write a computer program that compares your table against the SQL table from MEDITECH • Open Database Access • Use 3rd party ODBC or .NET product to extract DPM subscripts, and save these to a SQL Table • Write a computer program that compares your table against the SQL table from MEDITECH
Developing your own Audits Drawbacks to these methods: • Programming background required (C#,ODBC,.NET,SQL, etc.) • Your program will break with the next MEDITECH schema change • Cost of acquiring 3rd party tools • Not optimized for speed
DR Auditor Overview DR Auditor from Blue Elm • Relatively inexpensive • Has a long history of uncovering problems leading to MEDITECH correction. • Audits may be scheduled • Easy to use – no programming background needed
Using the DR Auditor • After a MEDITECH update, it is critical to run a Schema Upload before running further audits • This automates the process of accounting for MEDITECH changes to table structures • Only takes about 45 minutes for this routine to execute
Using the DR Auditor • Tables with <= 100,000 rows should be audited at a 1:1 sample rate • Tables > 100,000 rows may be audited at a rate such that 100,000 rows will sampled. ( 1 million row would be audited at a 1:10 sample rate ) • However, I have run audits on 12 million row tables at a 1:1 sample rate when it is absolutely required to guarantee table accuracy.
Using the DR Auditor • The DR Auditor has the great ability to group multiple related audits from the same DPM together • The method of sampling all the data works equally as fast if the DR Auditor is sampling ten tables at time, or if it is only sampling one • Take advantage of this ability when sampling MEDITECH DPMS containing large amounts of data, such as BAR.PAT or LAB.L.SPEC.
Using the DR Auditor Re-analyzing vs. Re-sampling • Before submitting errors to MEDITECH, use the Re-analysis routine to run a second comparison of the sample versus the MEDITCH table. • This prevents errors due to MEDITECH transmission lag • Audits more than 3 days old should be re-sampled instead, as significant edits may invalidate the sample • The re-sample takes longer to run than the re-analysis
Using the DR Auditor • Only Audit DR tables you are either reporting from or are planning on using • MEDITECH has limited resources for Data Repository support, you only want them to work on the issues that can most help you • Audits do use up some system resources
Using the DR Auditor • When reporting issues, always include examples of missing data • Obtain these by running a Report on an audit, then choosing the Export to a text file routine • Copy the contents of the text file and paste it into the MEDITECH task, so they have the example available to work with
Using the DR Auditor • A new ability involves using the DR auditor to re-queue missing rows • This process has been automated for Saint John’s Hopkins -- Bayview • After Audits are run, missing rows are saved to a file, and then are automatically re-queued to transmit to the Data Repository • When the number of missing rows is not too large, this helps preserve data integrity