The imebase blog

Chris and I have been doing most of our updates on the Innova Partners company blog, but I thought I’d toss a quick update here just in case.

The OWASP Security Conference in NYC is awesome so far! We’re learning so much about security, and we can’t wait to come back and implement some of the things we’ve learned! Here’s a rundown of the talks I heard today:

• Web Application Security Road Map: A quick rundown of the state of application security
• OWASP “Google Hacking” Project: Using Google to uncover vulnerabilities in web applications
• Get Rich or Die Trying: How malicious hackers made millions (and got caught) defrauding or attacking critical applications
• New Exploit Techniques: Should have been about clickjacking, a new technique for attacking websites, but at the last minute the talk was pulled due to NDA. Still a fantastic Q&A session.
• Industry Outlook Panel: Listened to some of the top cats in the biggest firms in NYC talk about how their companies handle security issues
• Coding Secure w/PHP: A quick primer on keeping web application code written in PHP secure

Add that to the fantastic set of training we had for the past couple of days and we’re just chock-full of knowledge!

Keep watching our posts at Innova Partners for more frequent updates!

Greetings! I’m Chris, manager of our engineering operations (translation: my team maintains the computer servers that run imebase). One of the dynamics of running a great Internet software operation is keeping on top of security - it’s not just a dynamic, but an absolute necessity. We do everything in our power to maintain the safety and sanctity of client data. But when it comes to security, you cannot have enough knowledge. I’m extremely excited to travel with Jon, one of our main imebase programmers, to OWASP AppSec 2008! OWASP is a premiere open source application security community, in which many of the best names in our industry participate. At this hands-on training and conference, we hope to harden our current skills and learn a great deal more including:

• Best practices for continuing security as a main focus.
• Designing our software defensively.
• Testing and security tools.
• Future vulnerabilities and threat analysis.
• Eat real New York pizza.

We’re really excited to learn some new stuff, meet great new contacts (including a couple vendors we use in our organization) and have some fun in NYC! Follow our conference updates here and over on InnovaBlog.

Looking for a great career in technology sales and marketing? Join the team at Innova Partners, the very successful healthcare software company in Columbus.

You’ll have an important role with imebase, our new on-demand product for the healthcare industry. As our first dedicated imebase salesperson, you’ll have a big impact in helping us develop our sales and marketing program, while developing your skills in selling Software-As-A-Service, a model that will come to dominate the software industry over the next decade. You’ll be supported by an excellent development and operations team, and will have ample marketing budget and support.

We offer a great work environment in Downtown Columbus; a fun, talented group of employees; and an opportunity with a new product that will improve your resume more in the next two years than practically anything else you could do. We also offer 100% paid health insurance, a great base salary, and a commission structure that will make you a lot of money if you can sell.

Responsibilities:

• Developing and managing relationships with customers
• Respond to incoming leads; generate outbound leads via phone, email, web
• Achieve sales goals, while creating satisfied and referenceable customers
• Demonstrating imebase via the Web

Required Skills/Experience:

• 1-5 years of quota carrying software or technology sales and account management experience.
• Consistent increase in earnings and commissions throughout sales career
• Strong written and verbal communications skills
• Great customer references
• Solid computer skills and interest in technology
• 2 or 4 year University Degree
• High energy
• Great attitude and overall nice person

Send an email if you think you’re the right person.

Experts in the IME business know that it’s all about documents. You get a referral with medical documents; you create claimant notification documents; (maybe) you create physician question documents; and ultimately, you return to your client an IME report document. And there are probably more documents in your typical process that I didn’t even mention. Your company lives or dies by how well you handle documents.

Because everyone in the IME business spends a lot of time working with documents, our goal is to make sure we’re delivering the best document management experience possible.

Learning from our customers, we knew our clients could benefit from some big enhancements to imebase document handling. So, with our most recent upgrade, we’ve provided a more seamless document experience:

• Put uploaded files and auto-generated documents in one place, the new Attached files folder
• Let customers generate standard documents, edit them, then replace the auto-generated document with their new version
• Let customers do anything they want to with uploads or auto-generated documents. Treat both types of documents equally, and allow download, print, fax, postal mail, or email. Keep a history of how these documents are handled and provide an audit log and “snapshot” of the document when it was sent
• Continue to support large document uploads like TIFF images from claims’ systems

To learn how imebase document management, or our dozens of other business-advancing features can help you rise above your competition, please get in touch.

Coming from the custom software world ourselves, we’re used to doing things “good enough.”  That magical place where anything less would be unacceptable, and anything more would be wasting money.  When you’re doing custom software, you’re paying for it all yourself-so every little improvement is a big hit to the P&L.

One of the great things about imebase, is that we let you share the cost of improvements with other customers.  And that makes improvements effectively cost less.  The real magic is that these improvements are just as valuable to your business as if they were made to a custom software system.  You get the same improvements-security, efficiency, or client convenience-you just get to split the cost.

So this week, when we rolled out improvements to Documents, Attached Files, Case Sharing, and all of our List views, every single user wins, but no one is paying a development bill directly.

Over the next few posts, we’ll take a look at some new features and how they benefit our imebase customers.

So, you’re excited about imebase but need to make sure everyone in your organization is onboard?

• Your compliance and legal folks probably want to know about data privacy and HIPAA
• Your IT folks want to know all about backups, scalability, and supported platforms
• Your product managers want to know how imebase improves service delivery
• And your executives want to know how imebase will help your organization make more money.

So we’ve written up a handy document with simple answers, all on one sheet of paper for each of these groups.  To use, just download the pack, print, and hand them out. Get the imebase_infosheets.

To apply, check out the post on Innova Partners.

I’m Jon Canady, and I’m a member of the software development team for IMEbase. Amongst other things, I take the new IMEbase software we write and push it out to the internet so everyone can use it – we call this “deploying.” We use a particular set of tools to keep this process quick and painless for our customers.

We use Subversion to track our code changes, and we use Capistrano to push those changes to our various servers. If that sentence doesn’t make your head spin, feel free to read on. Everyone else: I promise not all of my posts will be this techy!

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you organize your email? I’ve found that people fall into two big categories: Inbox Cleanies and Inbox Messies.

Cleanies have neatly made 500+ folders to organize their stuff and once a piece of email hits that Inbox, it’s whisked away to be filed in it’s proper place. If more than 5 emails are in their Inbox at any one time, a cold sweat breaks out on their forehead.

I don’t have any folders. And my Inbox, well, it’s overflowing with 3,285 emails at this second. I’m not much of an Inbox Cleany. Need an old email, however, and I can produce it in just a few seconds. How is this feat of trickery achieved you might ask? Presto - simply by using the sorting and filtering features in my email client (mail in Mac OS X rocks by the way).

imebase was designed for Inbox Messies. By using the built in sorting and filtering features, you should be able to lay your hands on any info you want in seconds.

In any listing in imebase, you will see a row just below the column headings (circled in red). This area is used to filter the list to show only the items you’re interested in at the moment.

Read the rest of this entry »

We launched saved filters last week-saved filters are a great way to customize your IME workflow by applying rules to create work-queues for a specific activity. Saved filters work on both your case and exam tabs.

For example, many IME providers call to follow-up on medical records that haven’t been received five days prior to an upcoming exam.  Now, you can filter your exam tab for this criteria, and save it as your “Upcoming Exam, Medicals not received” queue.  Here are some more ideas for saved filters:

• Exam completed, Report not received
• Upcoming exam, call to remind claimant
• File reviews due in next five days

These are just the tip of the iceburg. You could also use saved filters to create reports such as:

• Month-to-date File Review requests from Acme, Inc.
• Addenda completed by Judy Nolan this week
• Exams completed by Dr. Jacobs this month

The row count at the bottom of each page is the number of items in each report, and you can click on the rows to drill down to the detail.

Go ahead and try saved filters in the Sandbox, or sign up for a free trial.