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Future of MEL? Could we call .NET apps from athenaHealth?

MEL, SQL, Oracle

Last Post by Anonymous 1 second ago

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DKimzey

(@dkimzey)

Posts: 3

Active Member

Topic starter

Just a few basic questions:

- Is there any reason that .NET could not be used to create notes? Would it be possible to call .NET apps from athenaHealth?

I really have the impression that MEL is not actively maintained. This is not an attractive career path for developers.

- Is there a future roadmap for MEL? It really has the appearance of a product that has been abandoned to community support (typically developers with full time jobs and not a great deal of spare time on their hands).

- Is the MEL Language being actively developed and maintained? I see that VFE is actively updated. I get the impression that MEL is not maintained and has not been for some time.

- The documentation is poor. For example, "athenaHealth" is mis-spelled on the "Other References" page as "athanaHealth". There are some references for "Flowsheet" but not a single mention of what a "Flowsheet" actually is in VFE and MEL. Is this the standard sheet in EMRs for patient vitals? Nothing in documentation explains what this is. - The VFE help looks like a CHM file from the 90s.

- This User Forum looks like a ghost town. Many topics have not been reviewed in years. It was put together quickly and glaring issues like having to login over and over again have not been addressed. This gives the overall impression of the kind of place where old software goes to die.

- Without painful workarounds, there is no way to load data into a VFE note from your own SQL queries. Often lists must be hardcoded. This creates constant maintenance issues as credentials change and staff move from provider to provider.

- There is no debugger for VFE. Debugging code requires a good number of UserOk() dialogs, SQL, and MEL log files. What could be a simple issue in .NET is a meticulous and time-consuming with MEL and VFE.

- No documentation exists that tells you what tables MEL_ADD_ORDER is using to check providers. SQL and MEL logging must be deciphered here.

- The VFE Designer suffers from a lack of methods to place and size controls where you want them. This makes the VFE tool extremely frustrating to use.

Posted : March 15, 2024 7:37 am

Lee

(@lee-cooper)

Posts: 348

Reputable Member

Hi Doug,

I think your post suggests a lack of familiarity with the EMR, it's resources, the companies involved with various products, the purpose of the CHUG Forums, and perhaps some of the laws surrounding medical documentation.

The CHUG Forums are for idea exchanges where users help users. It has no official affiliation with either athenaHealth, for the EMR, or Logical Innovations, for VFE. Yes, the forums have fallen out of favor, but that was in large part due to the timing of domain renaming after the sale from GE and COVID. It simply has not (yet) been restored to its former glory. I will agree, there are many areas currently that require attention and you might wish to bring those issues up to the CHUG Board.

With regard to complaints about athenaHealth, MEL, and supporting documentation, you might want to contact athenaHealth Support and/or your athenaHealth Customer Service Rep. Consider inquiring about the Customer Success Portal as well, where all the documentation resides for the athenaFlex product lines.

With regard to complaints about Visual Form Editor (VFE), you may want to contact VFE Support. You can also inquire about the Basic and Advanced VFE classes which would go a long way to answering some of the questions you seem to struggle with. For example, in Basic VFE, we cover what a flow sheet is and how it relates to the Patient Chart and Encounter Forms. This is also covered in the EMR Help file. As for the typo in the VFE Help file, I believe that has been corrected in the upcoming release of VFE v10.0.

With regard to MEL itself, understand it is a proprietary language that is developed primarily by athenaHealth FOR athenaHealth. That we, as end users, are permitted access to various ‘hooks’ and that they are able to maintain their certifications and remain in compliance with the laws of medical practice and medical records speaks volumes about how hard they do try to work with the consumer.

As a developer, you understand that often we must work within a framework and the limits associated with it. It is these challenges that lead us to become better engineers.

I hope this helps.

Posted : March 18, 2024 1:43 pm

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