about Edward Koscic & Associates, LLC
My first client in the long-term health care industry was Menorah Park, located in Beachwood, Ohio. They engaged me to find state of the art software program to address the clinical end, accounting area, general ledger, and payroll. Steve Rachelson, the new CEO, was just hired by MP. He had arrived from a facility in New Jersey that was using VistaCare, out of Belleview, WA. My involvement, written into the contract, was to select and install the software and the hardware. The hardware consisted of 2 386's with 40MB hard drives, 12 printers, and 12 monitors; 600 feet of cabling with routers, active and passive hubs, and a Novel 1.5 network operating system. We also selected WordPerfect for the Ward Clerk's and the secretaries to do word processing, replacing their manual typewriters.
The CFO at the time was Robert Schafer, who was using Lotus123. That was the extent of their computerization; everything else was done manually.
After several months, we were successful in converting all of the secretary's to WordPerfect and the network was completely installed and functional. After one year of training and installation, all applications were up and running.
You need to understand that, at this particular time (18 years ago), MP had 300 skilled residents and 200 residents living in Myers apartments. Fast forwarding, they currently have over 4000 residents; in terms of hardware, they have gradually moved from the 386 to 20 severs, 400 workstations, and countless printers.
The term Go2Guy was recommended by Bob Schafer, primarily over the past 18 years; any time MP needed new software or new technology, their staff always came to me for assistance. In the progression of things, MP shifted from DOS, to Unix, to Windows. Throughout the years, things like a complete Home Health Care Software program, an electronic medical record software program, and biometric security programs. This has been an excellent relationship and I have used them as a referral source many times.
Some of the reasons for success are due to the planning that went into this process; the lions share of the credit must go to Steve Rachelson, who is a real world visionary as far as the LTHC industry is concerned; he always ensured that there was staff buy-in in regards to whatever software was selected. An important part of the planning was our proprietary needs analysis, as discussed below.
Our needs analysis was developed for three major reasons: 1) To help develop the most critical needs in the application software. 2) To assure the organization that the vendor could address the "must" needs in the application software, and if they couldn't - this provided a vehicle to negotiate for this feature to be developed prior to implementation. 3) To ensure that we could control the presentation of the software during the demonstration phase to ensure that it really addressed all the needs that we had outlined. If this vendor was the vendor of choice, the needs analysis would become part of the contract.
It is critical to have user input in order for the needs to be successful. We have developed, over the last 15 years, very detailed needs analysis'; however, this is not to say that a company could not add addition needs if they thought they were critical in nature. Our strong feeling is that the relationship between the vendor and the organization should be a positive relationship, not an adversarial relationship - therefore, making it a win-win situation across the board.
In conclusion, MP always had a plan; this was the main reason for their success. The plan that they had included goals and levels, almost like an architectural building plan. Any time they needed to add a new division of the organization, it was outlined in the plan.
Bob Schafer has since retired; however, MP continues to carry on the same strategy into the future. In the past 20 years, I have continued to rate MP as the BEST facility that I have worked with.
Click here to view Ed's technology predictions from 2007. See how many of these hold true today.
