Tricks of the Trade: Auditing MAGIC Scheduled Reports

Contributed by: John Sharpe, President, Comstock Software, Inc.

A recent audit request prompted me to write an NPR Report to identify current extracts for a BAR Third Party Administrator (TPA). While a standard MEDITECH report did exist off the MIS Spooling menu; it was not targeted towards the information I needed. Let’s retrace my steps by writing such a report in the MIS.JOB data procedure module (DPM) in the ‘mis.job.day.list’ Detail Segment. Since I know that my users will appreciate this report being sorted by Spool Group; I’m going to jump ahead and add the MIS.JOB.schedule.spool.group as the report’s index.

I find business users in Patient Financials prefer such information communicated in a spreadsheet format; so let’s structure this report as a Meditech DOWNLOAD. To keep this article on topic, I’ve included MEDITECH Download Tips at the bottom of this article.

On page 2 of the report writer; we set the MIS.JOB.active field to “Y”; because our users have requested current extracts going to a particular vendor. We also set up the keyword CO as a SELECT on MIS.JOB.report.name to select all schedule entries with a report in the desired (in this case BAR) DPM.

On page 3, we set the fields: spool.group, database, job.mnemonic, user, day, report name. Other fields in this DPM that may be useful to your users: frequency, report.title, spool.comment, start.date and status.

Because this is a DOWNLOAD; we set a FOOTNOTE of FD (field delimiter) of 44 as the ASCII code for a comma.

To run the report for all BAR scheduled reports, enter the free text "BAR" in the lookup.

I’ve taken the liberty of importing this file into Microsoft Excel, which you could pivot or filter to the user’s needs.

MEDITECH Download Tips:
- http://comstock-software.com/blogs/npr/2006/01/meditech-npr-download-tips.html
- http://comstock-software.com/blogs/npr/2007/10/multiples-in-downloads-npr-report.html

John Sharpe is President / NPR Consultant at Comstock Software, Inc. John hosts the ‘Meditech NPR Report Writing’ blog at http://comstock-software.com/blogs/npr/ where you can learn and read more about NPR Report Writing.