10/15/08 The DataPlus Dashboard!!!

I am pleased to announce that we will soon release a new module for DataPlus, a Dashboard! A Dashboard is report that shows Key Practice Indicators (KPI) all on one page. Our Dashboard contains 9 KPI's, including two new ones that are not available on any other CustomPlus report....AR Days and Point of Service Collections!

Other KPI's include: Charges by Month, Net Collection Rate, Aging, Office Visits, Surgical Cases, Payments by Month, E&M Bell Curve, Payor Mix, and Charge Entry Lag Time. All the reports are shown on a roll 12 month basis, so there is no formatting needed when new data is obtained, The Dashboard comes with a ONE BUTTON REFRESH...that will refresh each report on the page automatically! You can also move the individual reports around to different locations, and point, click and drag and drop just like you do in the other CustomPlus reports...you can even drill down to get the full detail!

Another great tool included in the Dashboard is goal formatting. For instance, if you have set a goal for your AR Days to be 60 or less, you can set a goal that graphically shows, if the AR Days are above 60, the AR Days will show RED, if they are 60 or below, it will show green. This works on all the reports, including Net Collection Rate. Even better, is that--in addition to Excel 2007's file size being significantly smaller than 2003--this Dashboard report is 75% smaller than the size of all of these reports combined! That being said, in order to prepare for the DataPlus Dashboard, it is necessary to upgrade your version of Microsoft Excel to 2007. Users of the 2003 version of Microsoft Excel are not eligible to obtain the Dashboard due to the much needed technological improvements in Excel 2007.

We will be scheduling a Webinar so each of our clients can see this live, however, we have posted an example, from a live --very large client that has been testing it, View Dashboard Report

I encourage you to please post questions, comments or suggestions for this Dashboard prior to its release. I also encourage you to participate in the poll, found at the top of this announcement. This will be an additional module to CustomPlus; pricing has not yet been finalized. There will be seperate Dashboards for General Medical Practices and Community Health Clinics as welll!

Special Webinars have been scheduled for October.

Frank Trew
Founder / COO

09/02/08 DataPlus and Excel 2007

DataPlus and Excel 2007

Microsoft released Excel 2007-its newest version of Excel. Because Excel is so important to the use of DataPlus, we have carefully reviewed this new product as it relates to DataPlus and CustomPlus, as well as the QueryPlus reporting system.

The differences between earlier versions of Excel and Excel 2007 are tremendous. The newer version is much faster, retrieves more data (eliminates the 64K row limitation) and provides functionality that our clients have been asking for, such as being able to multi-select items from the data elements, automatically finding duplicate items based off a field's value and etc.

With Excel's improvements, come substantial changes in the pivot functionality when compared to older versions. Because of this fact, your practice will require additional training. Furthermore, Microsoft Excel 2007 and previous versions are not compatible with each other. The compatibility mode that Excel 2007 provides (i.e. allowing files from both versions to be viewed) does not work well with with large pivot tables. CustomRefresh--our proprietary product that you use to auto refresh your reports each month--works on either version. CustomRefresh is not compatible with multiple versions of Excel (ie. Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 - Compatibility Mode).

Because of this compatibility mode issue, you have two choices regarding upgrading to the new version of Excel.

1. Make no change and stay on the current version of Excel (prior to Excel 2007).

2. Upgrade all of the users in your practice, who access CustomPlus or QueryPlus to the new version of Excel. The upgrade costs approximately $ 100.00.

Because of the new functionality and speed of Excel 2007, we recommend the upgrade--but that is your choice. If you choose to upgrade all of your users to the new Excel version, DataPlus will need to upgrade all of your reports to work with the new version of Excel, at a one time cost of $450.00. This includes one hour of training. We will be holding Webinar type introductory sessions for Excel 2007 starting in January.

If you choose to do nothing, and another user on your system is updated to Excel 2007, running in compatibility mode, it will break DataPlus. Fixing this problem will require custom services at the rate of $250.00 per hour to re-install all of your reports. This is not covered under your current support agreement.


Our goal is to provide a timely path to the new functionality offered by using Excel 2007. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to call our support team.

DataPlus Support
1-888-688-3282