Happy Thanksgiving!

Query Facility Now Supports Department Users

The Query Facility can now be deployed to users that are authenticated at the Department Security Level. Contract Managers can now add Department Level Users to the Query Role. All Queries they create including both adhoc and saved queries will be limited to the departments they are authorized to use.

If you have questions on this new feature, please e-mail me at jreuter@Rippe.com. For more information on Contract Guardian, please visit www.contractguardian.com.

Transfer Merge Departments, Contract Types and Attachment Types

Several new transfer facilities have been added to Contract Guardian. An Administrator can now transfer or merge contracts and attachments between Departments and Types.

As an example, a region may have 100 contracts associated with a type say "Affiliate Agreements" and 50 more under "Affiliation Agreements". If you want all 150 to be in the 'Affiliation Agreements" type, you can transfer the contracts then delete the "Affiliate Agreements" type. This can now be completed in seconds by the Administrator!

The same can be done for Departments and Attachment types. These features are available from within the specific table maintenance function.

Introduction to Rippe & Kingston Video

A short video was created for Rippe and Kingston Systems that discusses R&K's Systems company. We have placed the video on YouTube. Click here to check it out. It provides brief information on our services including our support for Google Apps with our clients.

Google Apps has a premier edition that is geared toward businesses. The application can help organizations reduce costs associated with e-mail and spam filtering, as well as, provide a wealth of new capability. Google Apps is all web based which allows access from any PC with internet connection for e-mail, spam filtering, management of office documents, sharing of office documents, web sites, video chat, voice chat, instant messaging and more....

For more information on Rippe and Kingston visit www.rippe.com. For specific information on our support for Google Apps, please visit www.productivity.rippe.com. By the way, the "productivity" web site was built with Google Tools.

Contract Guardian Training Videos

We are pleased to announce the availability of several new training videos. They are available from the Training tab within Contract Guardian. We have videos that range from providing an overview of the application to very specific features like changing your password and how to perform an inquiry. Report Generation how to videos are also available. If you have any questions, please e-mail jreuter@rippe.com.

Work-In-Progress Added

Contract Guardian now supports work-in-progress contracts as well as current contracts. Work-in-progress contracts allow users to enter contracts that are not executed yet but need to be available to the user community and the responsible parties. New features will be added based on this status.

John Reuter Shares Contract Guardian

As usual, John is always happy to share the Contract Guardian story.  If any of the readers did not have the opportunity to attend the conference...just give us a call.

R&K Presents at National Health Care Compliance Conference

1,600 Health Care Compliance Risk Officers from across the United States attended the conference.  R&K of course was sharing with the attendees our award winning Contract Guardian.

Contract Guardian and United Way

ContractGuardian.com will contribute ten dollars to the United Way’s National LIVE UNITED Campaign for each Contract & Commercial Management LinkedIn Member that attends the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) Convention in Las Vegas from April 26th to the 29th, 2009 and visits us at booth #309 for 10 minutes. The attendees will see Contract Guardian which is our contract management hosted solution for contract managers in the healthcare industry. It is a powerful but easy to use solution designed for environments with many users that need read-only access to contracts with automatic e-mail notifications. Users can access documents from any computer with a browser. Attendees can use this opportunity to help our fellow Americans and learn something at the same time.

CHRISTUS Health Brings Transparency to Contract Management

Diana M. Holland, program manager, Strategy and Innovation, Business/Financial Strategies with CHRISTUS Health’s Information Management team, said "With Contract Guardian, the entire contract management process is more transparent, which allows us to build our operations on a process, rather than being dependent on individual people. Deployment is simple and only requires placing an icon on the desktops of the users. Nothing else needs to be installed or maintained."

Read the entire article published by LANSA.

Upgraded Generator for ContractGuardian's Facility

HARDWARE: Rippe & Kingston recently replaced their Generator at the ContractGuardian Data Center. The generator operates on natural gas to provide immediate backup and delivery of diesel fuel is not required . The final steps are being completed that include the secured enclosure and electrical hookups.

SOFTWARE: Contract Guardian includes a very easy to use Microsoft Excel Interface that is available from within the managed service. It allows an authorized user to access their contracts and manipulate in Excel. Stark Law compliance capabilities is also being included in the software.

Visit www.contractguardian.com for additional details.

Contract Guardian Enhancement for Stark Compliance

Several enhancements have been made to Contract Guardian's Other Party capabilities in Contract Maintenance. The Contract Managers can now search for related parties using a "free form" search and the application will search anywhere in the name field for the occurances entered regardless of case and position. Also, the Contract Manager can add a new related party record directly from the search screen. This enhancement will allow the Contract Manager to more fully utilize the application and assist with Stark compliance for conflict of interest. For additional information see our Stark Compliance page at www.contractguardian.com.

Stark Law and Contract Management

If you haven’t reviewed your physician contracts lately, it’s high time you did. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) are enforcing Stark and federal anti-kickback laws with renewed vigor, and hospitals need to be wary of any and all agreements made with physicians past, present, and future.

Any financial arrangement between a hospital and a physician or a family member triggers Stark. It doesn’t matter what the arrangement is with the physician or what the referral is because any financial agreement, whether it’s new or old, will trigger a Stark question when that physician makes a referral.

To learn more visit our Stark Law Compliance page at www.contractguardian.com.