Back when I was running an office of ten psychologists and therapists, there was no HIPAA. There were no online medical records. We did our filing the old fashioned way, in a filing cabinet. We had one DOS program we used for billing that was made in Canada somewhere. Tech support took days to reach, and even longer to resolve an issue, and it was all there was.

I made reminder calls daily for some of the doctors. The therapists would make their own reminder calls. Since they were merely renting office space, I wasn’t on their payroll and couldn’t do extra tasks for them. How awful that was for them, they would make a simple call to remind a person of their appointment the next day, and the person would engage them with their issues. It was all the therapists could do to end their calls quickly. I could overhear it all from my front desk. Sometimes I would chuckle. Too bad they didn’t have someone else making their calls.

Once a day I would make my calls. I hated making those calls probably as much as the therapists hated making their own calls. The people on the other end would range from angry and annoyed to positively gleeful—they were seeing psychologists after all, perhaps for their telephone mood swings, I sometimes thought. It took about an hour for me to confirm ten appointments.

When HIPAA passed we were left scratching our heads and rushing around, checking the locks on filing cabinets and moving the locked cabinets to a locked closet. I still had to make my reminder calls though, and HIPAA made it more difficult for me. What I wouldn’t have done for an automated and HIPAA compliant service back then. We already had to be discreet with our calling because of the nature of the business, and now because of HIPAA, my life was chaos.

The issues of reminder calls were not the only thing I struggled with when HIPAA came on the scene. We removed our “sign in” sheet from the front desk, I only did filing when I was certain no one was in, or going to be in the office, lest they glance a name on a sheet of paper from afar. I never left papers on my desk, and I always locked my computer, even if I just was running to the restroom. Additionally, I couldn’t make calls to insurance companies to follow up on invoices, unless I was certain someone wasn’t listening in. I didn’t want to let anyone around hear a patient’s name or private information.

Eventually, we just moved the computer desk, phone and computer into that locked closet and I would spend hours hidden away doing all my work in there. I suppose I was lucky that the closet was actually converted from a bathroom and had a small window, as the offices were in an historic house that had been renovated. Incidentally, I think this prepared me for my next job, which happened to be in a basement and offered about the same amount of sunlight as my little closet.

I imagine that the creators of HIPAA didn’t mean for people like me to begin working in tiny spaces, or closets devoid of outside light, but maybe they did. I don’t know. What I do know is that I would have spent fewer hours in that closet if I could have used InphoniteVoice to make my reminder calls.

All of my experiences in that office and closet gave me the strong foundation and background for working at Inphonite. It’s interesting to me the path HIPAA has taken me on personally, and I am eager to see where we’re going next.

ftp://ftp.inphonite.com/downloads/InphoniteVoice/CSV-Import.zip

The new key fields are the Source Columns and the Column Mappings in the File layout section. The Source Columns allows you to define what your delimited file looks like. Here's an example of a simple Source Columns definition:

In the above sample, the import would look for LastName, FirstName, PrimaryNumber, CompanyName and Groups as valid headers in the source file. You can import column headers from a delimited file by selecting Import | Import Column Headers from the menu. This will look at the CSV file and import the headers for you. You can also export the columns as a template to save as a backup or to import into a different import instance. Now that you created the source columns you need to map the data to the destination columns. To accomplish this open the Column Mappings configuration. Here's what that dialog looks like:

The above example maps the columns in the source file to the available fields in InphoniteVoice. To map a new column, select the column you would like to map to. Then select the column to map to from the Source Columns list and select Insert. You can combine multiple source columns fields into one InphoniteVoice field by specifying multiple fields in the template. You can also put static text into the template field to have a particular import always fill out a field with a static value.

InphoniteVoice's new Flexible Delimited Import gives you to ability to control the format of the data and make changes with ease.

Inphonite’s ShoutOut (Shoutout.inphonite.com) service is a great solution to that dilemma.

It's a free text to voice call program. At a math teachers’ conference last year, the instructors recommended a few websites that could do text-to-voice. However, they either cost money per call or the text-to-voice was so unintelligible that the message was missed. I’ve used ShoutOut and it’s better at converting text to speech. I tested with “I like to read. I read a book.” and it differentiated between the two “read” pronunciations correctly.

Teachers can use this to remind students to complete and bring in homework, let them know about a special class activity, remind them if class is in a different building, or other such uses. The system is limited to 25 calls per email address per day and one call per phone number per day. If you have multiple email addresses, you can send 25 messages from each one and reach all of your students.

I would recommend Inphonite ShoutOut to any teacher for standard classroom reminders.