InSight as an organization has over time built up a strong contingency of members and volunteers with solid interest and passion in this community. We humbly hold our own knowledge and experiences as our core value and it’s this collective value that helps to perpetuate our growth even more.

As a means to keep us tapped not only into the changing landscape but also into our community needs, we recently conducted a Member Needs Assessment.

The results of these findings were highly interesting and will serve well in validating and supporting our own plans for the future.

While results of this feedback are still being incorporated into our strategic plan, there are opportunity areas worth highlighting to give you a snapshot of what’s on the horizon.

To read the President's Message in its entirety, click here.

InSight would like to invite you to share your user experience, best practice and/or tip/trick as a presenter at the 2007 InSight Annual Conference. Taking place October 18-20 in Atlanta, Georgia, both seasoned and first time presenters are invited to submit their abstracts for review by the InSight Education Committee.

In recognition of the time and dedication required to provide InSight members with quality education, accepted speakers will receive a reduced conference registration rate of $295.

The submission deadline is March 31 and abstracts will be reviewed as they are submitted, so you are encouraged to act as soon as possible. Submit your abstract today!

InSight is happy to announce that we have partnered with the McKesson Integration Advisory Council (IAC). As CSEs (Customer Satisfaction Enhancements) are categorized as Integration issues by InSight SIG Volunteers, they are being sent to the IAC for review. From the last Enhancement cycle, 8 CSEs that were marked as Integration issues are now being addressed by the IAC with the cooperation of InSight.

If you are a current InSight member and would like to take part in a focus group on behalf of InSight, please fill out and submit an Agreement to Serve form. We are very excited about this new partnership and the new value that is being delivered to you, our membership. Please contact InSight HQ with questions.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the March Discussion Period. Check back soon for Final Categories. The next Discussion Period for the Strategic Product Change Model will begin on June 1 and run through June 15. Visit your Dashboard Page to view your SIGs and the CSEs in your interest areas. Remember, any CSEs submitted by May 20 will be in the June Discussion Period. Please contact InSight HQ with any questions.

As a customer-run organization, members are critical to growth. InSight recognizes where member involvement not only strengthens but drives community value. As a result, it’s important that members are given the tools and opportunity to grow their own community. InSight’s new Recruit-A-Member Program will allow members to do just that. Available soon, current InSight members can enroll new members and receive prizes through an automated point system. Watch your inbox for more details and find out how you can contribute to the InSight community and reap rewards up until the annual conference.

InSight is encouraging all members to consider a leadership position. Leaders are individuals in the McKesson Product Solutions community who feel a desire to help InSight reach its fullest potential. There are currently five open positions:

• President Elect
• Secretary
• Director of Education
• Director of Enhancements
• Nominating Committee (5 positions open)

Nominations begin Friday, March 30. Watch your inbox for more details or visit the InSight web site as the date approaches. Contact InSight HQ with questions.

As part of continuing efforts to reduce the cost of healthcare IT for its customers, McKesson is the first to offer a cost-effective, open-source healthcare IT solution from Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions. The Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, which includes dedicated support and services, is designed to meet the mission-critical demands of healthcare while lowering the cost of IT ownership – versus proprietary technologies that are costly to acquire, maintain and scale.

“The Red Hat solution offers our customers a reliable, affordable platform for delivering safe, high-quality patient care using McKesson’s clinical applications,” said Michael J. Simpson, MPT’s chief technology officer.

McKesson has deployed many of its advanced Horizon Clinicals® applications on Linux running on Intel-based hardware. Hospitals with these deployments have already realized cost savings of up to 60 percent compared with traditional system deployments.

“Over time, we have evolved our approach to system reliability in healthcare,” said Kay Carr, chief information officer at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston. “We used to focus on redundant hardware for disaster recovery, with an emphasis on back-up and restore procedures. That was a costly but necessary approach at the time. Innovative technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Linux have allowed us to transform our approach to one of continuous availability.”

“Now we’re deploying our McKesson clinical applications on multiple, inexpensive, commodity-based servers set up in separate locations for site-to-site failover. With this highly flexible approach, we have the mission-critical reliability we need for patient care at a much lower cost.”

Read McKesson’s press release for details.

NewsLink is constantly striving to improve service and value to readers. So we want to hear from you!

What do you like about NewsLink? Are there certain topics/issues you’d like to see covered? Feel free to drop us an email. Let us know how we're doing!