For Australian users of Bp Premier

The latest version of Bp Premier – Indigo – is set to be released at the end of this month.

New features include enhancements to:
• My Health Record
• Reminders
• Patient record import and export
• Confidential material
• Appointment book
• Contact attempts
• Subpoena Tool

Look out for an Elevate e-mail notification towards the end of the month with information on the Release of Bp Premier's Indigo program update.

For Australian users of Bp Premier

Did you know that computer and laptop damage, storm damage and theft round out the top ten reasons small businesses claim on insurance?

What would you do if your Practice couldn’t use computers for a day? A week? Do you know where and how safely your data is being stored? Do you know if your back up restorations are working correctly should the worst occur?

Learn the answers to these questions and much more by joining us for a Be in the know session focusing on Disaster Recovery, running on 14 March. Click here to register.

For Australian users of Bp Premier and Bp Allied and New Zealand users of Bp Allied

Bill Gates was coined several years ago as saying, “A rule of thumb is that a lousy process will consume ten times as many hours as the work itself requires.” * 

The systematic examination and improvement of administrative processes can seem scary and overwhelming, particularly if you don’t know where to start. If you want to increase productivity in your Practice, this article is for you.

Do you find yourself thinking about any of the following scenarios or questions?
- Have my patients ever complained about a business process? Perhaps they’d accidentally received an incorrect reminder notice, or were recalled in for a reason that wasn’t clear to them?
- Does your Practice produce numerous errors or repeat the same errors?
- Do you have a desire to want to know how your Practice can improve its efficiency so your Clinical staff can spend time on more valuable work?
- Do you want to understand the correct end-to-end process across your clinic from how you open to your end of day procedure?
- Do you have duplicated tasks across multiple areas?
- Is my data clean? Is it free of duplicates? Does it have clean and clear reminder reasons? Do my reports pull the correct information for my requirements?

Let us help you take the step towards a more efficiently run Practice. Remote training can be highly customised to suit your Practice’s need, and with one flat fee per hour, it’s a very cost effective way of getting a lot of knowledge to a lot of people. With technology that allows us to see how your business operates, we are best placed to show you more efficient ways of doing things. To find out more information or to book in a time slot, click here or contact the Product Training and Knowledge Team on 1300 40 1111 in Australia or 0800 40 1111 in New Zealand today.

*Find out more in “The Power of Business Process” by Susan Page AMACOM 2016

Change of Primary Contact form

For Australian users of Bp Premier

Every Bp Account Holder has a list of Contacts – authorised people who have various levels of access to details of the site. Keeping your contact details up to date is very important to ensure a smooth continuation of your day to day business.

Your Primary Contact is the official nominee of the Account Holder, fully authorised to decide user licence keys, service restrictions, and more. To Bp, no other person is authorised to change any details you’ve provided us, or restrict service to any other person. If the Primary Contact ceases this responsibility or leaves the Practice, you must advise of any change in Primary Contact

If you change your Primary Contact, then we need to have authorisation for this change by completing the Change of Primary Contact form, either from the present Primary contact, or from the business owner / CEO / Administrator etc.

A new Primary Contact cannot authorise themselves unless they are the business owner.

If you have recently changed your Primary Contact and have not updated your details yet, please call our Sales & Customer Enablement team on 1300 401 111 or email us and we will send you a Change of Primary Contact form for you to update.

With the new privacy and data breaches scheme that came into effect in February, it is more important than ever for Practices to make sure they properly secure their data.

The Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme under Part IIIC of the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act) established requirements for entities in responding to data breaches. Practices will now have data breach notification obligations, when a data breach is likely to result in serious harm to any individuals whose personal information is involved in the breach.

The NDB scheme only applies to data breaches involving personal information, that are likely to result in serious harm to any individual affected. These are referred to as ‘eligible data breaches’.
To ensure your practice is prepared, Bp recommends taking 3 simple steps.
1. Set up passwords with a high level of security
2. Ensure the correct permissions have been set up within your practice
3. Perform regular backups and updates to your software

For more information on the changes follow the link.

Time to sit down, grab a cuppa and have a read about the “elephant in the room” that could have major implications for your Practice.

Microsoft has recently discontinued extended support for various older versions of their Windows and SQL platforms. These include:
• Windows XP
• Windows 2003 (including SBS versions)
• Windows Vista
• SQL Server 2005 (all variants)

Microsoft is no longer providing updates to technologies that may be used in Bp Premier for the following operating systems:
• Windows 8
• Server 2008

If you are currently using one of these retiring platforms, Bp strongly recommends that you discuss with your Practice the feasibility of upgrading.

Bp can only effectively support versions which are currently supported by Microsoft. And, as previously advised, Bp Premier LAVA and its service packs are the last versions of Bp Premier that will support these Operating Systems and versions of SQL.

Apart from not being able to take advantage of the latest software releases, Practices should be aware of the risks associated with using older Microsoft versions. Failing to upgrade may put your Practice at a higher risk of exposing your system to cyber-attacks - something that none of us want.  For more information about the Microsoft lifecycle and policies search for your Microsoft product here.

Best Practice is releasing a new version of Bp Premier – Indigo – at the end of March this year, which will not support Windows 2008 or earlier Microsoft platforms. However, this new release of Bp Premier will support:
• Windows 7
• Windows 8.1
• Windows 10
• Server 2008 R2
• Server 2012
• Server 2012 R2
• Server 2016

NB: Each program upgrade adds new database fields and data to the database. This is particularly relevant for sites updating from a version prior to LAVA. The LAVA version introduced new functionality that significantly increased the minimum size of the Bp Premier database.

If your practice uses SQL Server Express Edition and your Bp Premier database is nearing the maximum size permitted (10GB), the installer will alert you that your database is nearing the limit and ask for confirmation to proceed.

If you receive this alert, Bp recommends you investigate the feasibility of upgrading your database edition to handle the increased data size, such as SQL Server Standard or SQL Server Enterprise Editions. If you continue with the upgrade and your database exceeds 10GB, you may not be able to add records or use some functionality until you upgrade the database edition. One option would be to perform the upgrade on a standalone trial Bp Premier server which has the latest backup of your production database and investigate the size of the database after the trial upgrade.

If it is not feasible to upgrade your Microsoft platform at this time, please note that Bp Premier LAVA and all its service packs can still be used. It makes economic and logistical sense to start succession planning so you can take advantage of the latest versions of Bp Premier with minimal disruption to your practice.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Support Team on 1300 40 1111 or email us – we are here to help you get the most out of Bp Premier.

For Australian and New Zealand users of VIP Gold

An ACC Contract update for March 2018 was made available on 1st March. For VIP Gold users, this data update will ensure your VIP Gold installation has the correct ACC changes for March.

This ACC data update contains the following changes:

• Changes to Physiotherapy contracts for Physio and Hand Therapy. Maximum visits go to 50, with no expiry.  (Please note: currently claims will still present with a 12 month expiry. You will have to manually update the referral should the claim exceed 12 months. We will be releasing a program update soon to address this).
• Changes to Cost of Treatment / STP contracts (including physio). Maximum visits go to 16, with 12 month's expiry. (Please note: if a claim already has more than 16 visits approved, the higher number remains).

These changes are backdated to include existing open claims.

To Check that the ACC changes have been applied: check contract setup go to Setup > Providers > Revenue Accounts > Select Details tab > Click on ACC Contracts button, modify each contract and look at the field Fixed No. of Triggers, this should be aligned to your contract.

Alternatively Create a New claim - the visit count (triggers) should align with your contract type.

If the changes have not been applied, please close VIP Gold on all computers. Open one VIP Gold session and re-check. If still not updated, please contact Support.

Support is available: For further information or advice on this notification, contact our Software Support team on 1300 40 1111 (in Australia), or 0800 40 1111 (in New Zealand), selecting Bp Specialist Products at the menu.

Team Bp had a great time at our first Conference for 2018 - Dietitians Unite which was held in Brisbane. 

It was a great event for Dietitians and our team from Bp Allied – Mel and Suzi - to touch base.

Mel and Suzi were happy to meet lots of Bp Allied users and Dietitians who were interested in finding out more.  And the catering was first class (and healthy!).

To check out the highlights click here.