You will know the final price for every job before any work starts. There are no cost overruns with us. All work is done on a firm fixed price basis. We calculate how long it will take us to complete your project based on our previous experience, then give you a price. Internally, we are calculating hours, but all you need to see is the final price. We've done contracts for as low as one hour of work ($75 at the time). To date, the largest signed fixed priced contract was around $50,000. But, you know the price up front.
Our usual charge for a "Management by Exception" query is $250 (which includes the first hour of our work and a user interface). The user interface allows you to run that query, sort and filter the results. The user interface also includes a login process to limit who is running the program. Most simple queries can be completed in an hour, and we can tell you how complex your query is going to be through our quote.
Simple update queries start at $250. An example of such a query would be, if a client indicates that they may be suicidal on a CCAPS, the center requires an extra data form be filled out by the therapist. If the therapist signs a note after such a CCAPS without filling out that data form, remove the therapist signature and add a comment that the data form is required. (If the signature is removed, the note will be put back on the author's task list.) The end result is that the EMR will automatically send back any note for that client written after the suicidal indicating CCAPS until that required data form is complete.
After you know the price for your first job and you wish to proceed, we have to get our standard master contract in place. How long it takes to get through your school's contracting process is up to your school. We've seen that take a week, and we've seen that take three years. All work is done based on individual work orders controlled by the master contract. There is no need for the individual work orders to get approval by your contracting office.
After the master contract is in place, you may need to set up a few things within your EMR, depending on the work we will be doing and how we are going to be doing it. This may include such things as setting up a user account, creating flags that will be needed, etc. The list of tasks within the EMR will be provided in the work order. If you need to set up a user account, it may be disabled immediately after your IT department takes the backup copy (typically overnight) and before you provide the login credentials to anyone.
Next, there is approximately 10 hours of our work removing all the personally identifiable information ("PII") from a backup copy of your database. That involves a lot of communication between us and your IT department, the IT department running queries for us, and sending us the results of those queries. The queries do a deep dive into your database to seek out and destroy PII and gives hints on where more PII may be hiding. As an example, at one school, our queries even discovered that when a request for information ("ROI") was returned, the school had set up sub directories on a PC for each client, and the client name was used as the name of the sub-directory, and the database happened to record that original directory name. It is a very extensive process. The final step of that is an email exchange between the counseling center director, your IT department and us, giving you a list of all the PII that was removed, asking everyone to verify that is all the PII. To date, we've waived charging for those 10 hours, but that may change in the future. The end result is a database void of any client PII, but with enough information still in it that the queries can be written that you need and a pair of queries that are very good at identifying and removing PII for your specific school that can be run against any future backups we need to remove PII from.
At this point, we are allowed to safely see your actual database backup using one of the three possible methods below and perform the contracted work.
This is our preferred method. Your IT staff prepares a development/testing copy of Ti* and a remote connection to that. All work will be done on your computer (remotely).
Your IT department enables the remote login on your test system and our consulting work is done on your server. When the work is done, you can disable the login.
Your IT department will be downloading files to us and we'll be working on our computer.
This may or may not work for your specific project. In general, this method works for read-only queries (things equivalent to a Ti* report), but not for complex automation. We will negotiate with your IT department if this is actually appropriate for your project. Your IT staff will FTP the backup to us. We load your database into our system and do your work on our system, and send you the results to test.
This will work for every project, but will cost more (there will be at least transportation time and expenses). We can do work at your office on your computer. Inquire and we can quote specifics for your project.
The work may be done on an hourly basis. We agree to your confidentiality agreement. You agree to our consulting agreement. The rest of this will be determined on an individual basis, but will make it a top priority of protecting your confidential client information. We have a long background of protecting client information.
When required, we will provide you with an FTP user name and password, which you will need for this process. If you already have an FTP Client, you may use what you already have. If you don't know what an FTP Client is or you know that you don't have one, just use the free FileZilla available at these links: Click here to download a Windows 32 bit version or here to download a Windows 64 bit version. After downloading, you may need to manually put the extension on the file (this file is an *.EXE executable).
If you don't know if you have a 32 bit or 64 bit versions of Windows, just realize that a 64-bit program will not run on a 32-bit machine, but may cause the machine to become unstable. So, in that case, reboot your PC, then try the 64-bit version first (since it will fail to run to run on a 32-bit machine), and if that fails, reboot again, then use the 32-bit version.
Launch the applicaton. Fill in the the following fields (near the top of the screen):
Click the [Quickconnect] button. If a box shows up titled "Unknown certificate", click the [OK] button. Now you should see 4 boxes in the middle of the screen.
To send us a file, you just click the proper directory in the upper left box, find the specific file in the lower left box and drag that file to the lower right box.
If we have placed a file for you to pick up in your FTP site, navigate to the directory you want to put the file on your PC in the upper left box (clicking on that directory to highlight it) and drag the file from the lower right box to the lower left box