Home Forums Discussions IT, Networking, PCs and more SQL-12 and HIPAA compliance

Just got a message this morning from AC. -- SQL express 12 is being deprecated.
AC provides a file for upgrading to SQL express 16.
I have downloaded this, and extracted it and am ready to try installing, but I'm afraid.
It looks simple, but I don't see any instructions for recovery if something goes wrong.
Has anyone tried this and have there been any problems?

The link has been removed 'temporarily' from the email to upgrade MS SQL so guessing there are some issues.

Interesting, guess you better wait Tom!

Thanks for the update Koby, the $200 does seem like a lot but the cost of everything is going up. Guess it is an incentive to try and make us be self sufficient or go on the cloud........

What happens if we go out of HIPAA compliance?
Federal marshals break into the office?
Medicare demands repayment of past 5 years of Medicare payments?
The sky falls in?
The server melts down?

Probably I will wait until 10.2 is out of beta, and then a little longer. I can only imagine what a SNAFU is in store for unwitting tamperers with the tower of cards we call Amazing Charts.

Figures link was removed.

I'll wait until the last moment to upgrade the SQL sever.

As for being not compliant, if the HIPAA police find out, then you get a big fine. As for how they would find out "...members of Covered Entities´ workforces are granted whistle blower protection for reporting non-compliance."

Basically, disgruntled ex-employees.

Hate to beat a dead horse, but here we are again with the LACK of communication from the company.
In my mind, this has been, and remains, one of the biggest weaknesses in Harris' performance.

Remember when we were told that a mandatory upgrade to V11 was coming or you lose your ability to eprescribe? I think that was end of 2020... after that announcement it was "put on hold" so the "drop dead date" was supposedly late 2021. Problem is... we were never told ANYTHING during that interval.

Here we are again - a faint announcement that you MUST upgrade. Then that is apparently withdrawn. Or is it? Who knows.
Seriously, Harris. How hard is it to send an email to everyone of us paying our annual fee, telling us WTF is going on?

Hi Jon,

The announcement that we put forth that we were removing the link as there were reported problems with the upgrade was the last communication we sent out and is the latest information we have at this time. This is currently with DEV and QA who are working on investigating what these issues are, and what the solution is for it. When we have more information, we will share it.

Hi Mark,

This is the problem. I received no notification of the link being taken down.

Thanks

Gene

Nor did I. How was this message sent?

I didn't know about the link being removed until saw the post on this forum. No email, no notification in AC. Thankfully I saw the post, I had already DL the SQL update before link removed but was waiting until closer to the expire date in July. Glad for this forum. Keep it up.

Sorry Mark but also did not get this message! I checked the inbox before posting here just to make sure. I found the original message and clicked on it to get to the page where the link was listed and in red it says "removed temporarily". There is a nice paragraph highlighted at the top that asks for us to hold off on download and explains a bit but no direct message in AC like the first one.

So can I tel my wife my procrastination paid off again?!?

Procrastination ALWAYS pays off when it comes to updates.

Gene

Is there somewhere we can sign up to receive these announcements? We didn't receive the second one.

I don't think so, the first message came into the inbox of AC as a message from ADMIN and was highlighted. I did not see anything in the email tied to the AC account so not sure if communication was supposed to be by email as well or not. Hopefully Mark will chime back in and see that a lot of us did not get the 2nd message.

Agreed.

Chris, you got the original as a message in AC? I did not. I am trying to figure out how I first learned about the original requirement.
Are you sure it wasn't a yellow message when you open AC in the bottom left corner? Unfortunately I don't think there is any way to save those...

I got the original message to do the upgrade as a highlighted message in my message inbox from AC

@JBS

I thought it odd it came in as a message from admin. I have seen messages in the yellow box but this one came in as a regular message, highlighted in red!

Here is a screen shot of the message

We send out these critical announcements to both the yellow box and as an admin message to the group inboxes. Now everyone uses the group boxes so many people don't see them so we have to do both. I the next release we're changing this so we can send it to every providers inbox or all users . We also sent emails to every practice for this sine it was important. Those are the only means we have to communicate with practices. Many ignore our emails and some don't pay attention to the yellow box so we hope adding it to the provider inbox will help solve this issue.

We expect the hold to be lifted shortly...Immediately after we posted this we had a half dozen practices fail the upgrade and were concerned so we pulled it while we investigated. Every failure was attributed to some other than the software itself.; not enough disk space, not meeting system min requirements, local network issues, etc,. We updated the installer to check for as much of this as we could to eliminate the failures due to these issues. In the end if a practice is going to do their own updates they need to follow the instructions and be technically inclined or hire an IT person for this. That or move to a hosted environment where we can manage this them. We've really tried to simplify these installs as much as possible..in the vast majority of cases it works just fine. Unfortunately we have many practices still tying to get through on old equipment or unique setups that it's impossible to anticipate everything out there.
This is exactly the reason you'll see fewer and fewer on-prem software solutions anymore...

@cconrad@ac just so you know what we are seeing on this end,

"We send out these critical announcements to both the yellow box and as an admin message to the group inboxes." I did not see this in the yellow box but I will say I do not log out and back in very often. I am one that doesn't necessarily ignore the yellow box, if you don't log in and out you don't see the message in this highlighted area.

"We also sent emails to every practice for this sine it was important." I did not get an email. There is only one email address that AC should have on file for my account. I have checked my inbox, spam and trash but none of these have an email from AC regarding this update.

The only message I saw was the one I posted with a screen shot above.
I am not sure that the message for SQL update went out the way you are thinking. I am not trying to call you out just want you to know that we may not be getting the message the way AC is intending. Thank You for posting here and getting back to us.

Just so you know I did log out and logged back in to see if the message for the SQL is in highlighted box. I do now see this message, weird thing is the box is not yellow highlight right now. The link when I click on the message does go to the update site with the new message to hold off on the update.

Perfect..that's exactly what it is supposed to do. I made it grey this time to catch peoples eye. It's been yellow with that same old message for a long time now so most folks are desensitized ...

I'm sending a separate email just to you personally asking for your PID so I can track down the email to see what happened to possibly help explain why others don't always receive these either

Thanks

Hi CConrad, FYI both my office manager and myself are listed as contacts (with our emails) in the AC Client Portal. Only my manager received the first email on May 25th. She did not receive the 2nd email.

I did not receive either email. I'm not sure why.
Can you please add me to the email group that you guys send email updates?

I will PM you our emails.

I spoke with Marketing...the email list we use is generated from every email address we have on file for each practice. It is not just a subset. When we send an email we receive back a confirmation that it was delivered to your server "Delivered" and if you click on it to open it we receive an acknowledgment of that as well "Opened". We're not being big brother here..this is the way every email service works in the world. When you click on an email the sender thinks you're interested in their product and will send you more emails:-)


In both cases for Chris and Josue we see them as being delivered and opened. Josue, in your case it was opened 4 times.. Here's the crazy part...your office manager shows opening it 41 times. ..Now I have no idea of how this works so don't shoot the messenger here..I can only tell you what we see from our end. It's possible you have some email scrubbing/monitor software that opens and scans these for viruses...We have that here on our corporate servers. but i don't know how that appears to the senders.

Also./.those inbox messages get pulled down from a service that runs periodically on your server..it's not instantaneous...I had to wait 3 days before i saw the message in my test database but my demo is ot on all the time


hope that helps for what it's worth...

Thank you, Cconrad! I misunderstood Mark's message above and thought there to be a second email going out regarding the upgrade pause. However, it appears there was just the one. I stand corrected. we both received that first email (not just my manager as I stated earlier).

As some of us stated, we downloaded the upgrade files before the link was taken down and otherwise didn't know about the announcement that the upgrade was being paused. I didn't actually do the upgrade but it would have been helpful to send out a 2nd email to hold off on the upgrade in case we had already downloaded the files and were planning to do it.

We will be sending out a 2nd email when it's ready for that very reason...we have updated the software and need to tell folks to re-download it. There's nothing wrong with the one you have but there are more checks for problems in the new one.

Right - we never use the "group" inboxes... have never really understood how they would be of benefit. But now if I go to the "Providers" box, I see a message on 5/25/2022 that matches the one ChrisFNP posted above.

So, Chris C... if I hear correctly, it sounds like you are correcting this by gaining the ability to send messages to all regular inboxes in AC. This would seem to be the best solution to communicate important news to all providers - better than emails (though I would encourage you to continue to send those) and better than the yellow box messages, which are useful but have their limitations.


And by no means shooting the messenger (we LIKE the messengers) but I would question the reliability of a system telling you emails are being opened when it tells you some were opened 41 times...

Hi Jon..yes...the next release will have the ability to send to everyone/and or just the providers. That won't be in place till next year so it's of little help today but will be for the future. This will be a huge boost for communicating effectively.

I too am confused by the 41 times but as marketing told me, all we can do is report on what the recipient's server responded to us with. we sent 10,000 emails and 300+ had more than 5 opens and some of those were in the hundreds of opens.

Well I take your emails very seriously! Some of them I re-read hundreds of times!

I am not shooting the messenger but still do not see the email, will you please ask marketing to see what address they used and PM me? I am wondering if one of the NP's that used to be here got the message and just deleted it.

@cconrad@ac

New email came in today at 4:33pm CST.

FYI, I opened it twice, once on the phone and once on the laptop, wonder what it shows on your end?!?

On a somewhat similar comment, when I was installing 11.2, I was told that the version being used had a bug in the script writer that affected interactions or something and to wait until that was fixed. That was supposed to be fixed three to four days after I was told which was about one month ago.

Any updates on the newest beta?

I got an email (regular, nothing in AC).
My plan is to wait until V11.2 sounds bullet proof and I will upgrade once, killing two birds with one stone.

That is a good idea. Don't want to change and upgrade the script writer only to have that bug.

I think the likelihood of the HIPAA police coming for me on July 13 is pretty slim.

Ran the SQL 2016 upgrade on my 5 yr old Windows 10 laptop that I use in nursing home and assisted living facility with AC 11.1.4 and went without a hitch.
GLTA

@Koby Glad to hear the update went well

I think I am going to try to go to Version 11.2 at the same time.

I am not worried about the HIPAA police but the way my luck is if I don't upgrade when required someone will find out and have just another excuse to lower the reimbursements!

on a side note, funny this morning, had to get a prior auth for an MRI due to a pt with a renal mass, lady from insurance wanted to know "is there a lesion?", untiI said the mass is a lesion they were denying the study