WELFORD CHART NOTES
NEWSLETTER
Volume 20, No. 5 May, 2002
copyright 2002, Welford Medical Computing, Inc. All rights reserved
VISIT PROTECTION (User's Manual, pgs. 703-705)
Visit Protection lets you rest assured that the visit you are viewing on the screen is exactly what you wrote when you originally stored it. This feature only works if you have activated Unalterable Notes (in System\Security\Options). There would be no point in such a feature if you were permitted to change your notes after storing them.
You might wonder why you need to protect visits if you have already selected Unalterable Notes. After all, once notes are made Unalterable, there is no way a user can change them after they have been stored. Although there is no way a user, using the program itself, can change an unalterable note, it is conceivable that a hacker, working directly with the computer's files themselves, could figure out a way to alter an unalterable note by manipulating the bytes themselves on the hard disk. This is the reason to use Visit Protection. Although you cannot prevent a hacker from changing things by activating Visit Protection, you will be able to tell if the hacker has made such changes. (The ways to prevent hackers from making such changes in the first place involve keeping your computer physically secure, using firewalls for Internet connections, running antivirus software regularly, and similar security measures).
First, let's activate Visit Protection:
1. Press System\Security. Enter the Master Password.
2. Press Options.
3. Make sure Unalterable Notes has been set to Yes. If not, do so now.
4. Check Protect new visits. This makes each new visit protected as it is stored. (This happens in less than a second).
5. Check Protect old visits. This protects all of the previously stored visits on your system. (This can take many hours if you have thousands of previous visits. You should plan to do this overnight if you have thousands of previous visits).
6. Press Ok.
The program then records the state of each visit and when you first set up visit protection.
Whenever see a visit in the Visiter, you can arrange to see in the upper right hand corner of the screen the status of this Visit Protection. "Protected" means the protection is in place and the visit has not been altered since the time it was originally stored. "Tampered" means someone has changed the text of the visit from the time it was originally stored. If you want to see this information automatically, then check Auto Check Protection (in the lower right hand corner of the Visiter window). Note that checking this option slows down the program, as it takes it about a second to verify that the text has not been altered. If you find this slowness annoying, uncheck Auto Check Protection.
You can also check to see if a visit is protected by pressing the Info button for that visit. The status of its protection is listed on the bottom of the screen, including the date and time that it was originally marked as protected, and the last time that its protection status was checked. Protection status is checked each time you press Info, and each time a visit is displayed if Auto Check Protection has been checked. If a visit has been tampered, you can thus narrow the time when it might have been tampered between the date it was last known to be intact and the date it was first known to have been tampered.
Enabling Visit Protection makes your data more secure and lets you demonstrate to third parties that the information has not been altered from the time it was stored.
RIGHT CLICK MENU IN EDIT FIELDS
A handy trick which you might not know about is that you can press your right mouse button down in any edit field in the program (not counting the Writer itself, which has its own right mouse menu). When you press the right mouse, a menu appears with the following choices:Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, and Select All.
You can use this menu to copy text from one place to another using the Windows Clipboard. For example, suppose you want to enter a Datebook entry more than once.
2. For Date, enter 6/1/2002.
3. For Time, enter 7:00 p.m.
4. Leave Status as Active.
5. For Message, type in "Executive Committee meeting".
6. Press your right mouse button and choose Select All. The text is now highlighted.
7. Press your right mouse button again and choose Copy.
8. Press Ok to store the reminder.
Now, let's add another reminder for an Executive Committee meeting on 7/1/2002:
1. Press Add.
2. For Date, enter 7/1/2002.
3. For Time, enter 7:00 p.m.
4. Leave Status as Active.
5. For Message, press your right mouse button and choose Paste. Note that your text is inserted here automatically.
6. Press Ok to store the reminder.
SEND US YOUR TIPS
If you have tips, shortcuts, questions, or suggestions for future newsletter topics, please send them to us at:Welford Medical Computing, Inc.
3779 Hermitage Trail
Rockford, IL 61114
or
MEDCOM Information Systems, Inc.
2117 Stonington Avenue
Hoffman Estates, IL 60195
http://medcom@emirj.com