Feature Guide

There are, at the time of writing, 115 look-up tables in HIFIS that you can customize. For a new HIFIS community, this can be overwhelming!

I've seen some communities go through every single table and want to make careful decisions about each and every option in each table, which takes so much time! There are roughly 1,400 options in these tables, combined (roughly 10 per table). So if you spent only 30 seconds on each option deciding whether you want it or not, you're still spending 10 hours goi…

One of the new features of HIFIS 4.0.59 is an automated client inactivity function. This makes use of a pre-existing field called Client State/Status, which used to only be able to be updated manually, and now adds an automation.

Previously, a client would have one of three statues: Active, Inactive, or Deceased. A user would manually change the value of the field if they wanted to mark a client as Deceased or Inactive. Of course, since it was a manual process, staff would hardly ever mark a cl…

In HIFIS 4.0.59.5 (December 2021), there's a new feature that allows you to clone an existing user. (If this sounds familiar, that's because we posted about the idea recently!)

What this option does is copies all the configuration from one user to a brand new user account: this includes the Roles, Service Providers they have access to, default Service Provider, and Rights for each Service Provider.

It's super simple to use. When you want to clone a user, just click on the new Clone User button…

As previously discussed, client privacy is a key concern for communities using HIFIS 4. One of the approaches to protect client privacy is to restrict who has access to a given client file.

A tool that HIFIS 4 provides to support this approach is called Attestation.  It's one of multiple tools that can be made use of, but it's simple to set up.

Attestation

When Attestation is active, when an agency first serves a client, someone from that agency needs to Attest that they are in fact serving the cli…

Client privacy is a primary concern for a number of communities who are considering using HIFIS 4.

It can be quite a challenge to understand the legal implications of what communities should be doing and should not be doing on this front, but here is a good resource to understand Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Many Provinces and Territories also have their own regulations, but they are frequently modeled after PIPEDA.

In general though, you can thin…

One of the privacy issues in HIFIS 4 has been reporting. You could set up your user rights templates to be as limited as you wanted, but when it came to reports, it was all or nothing.

If you gave a user permission to run reports, they could run all reports, and the reports could be designed to pull data from anywhere. So reports acted as a bit of a loophole. Maybe I want to share some case management information but not other information, so I'll make a report, and now even users that don't ha…

In HIFIS 3, the strength of users' passwords didn't matter as much, because a user had to be at the physical computer in order to login, which meant they were on site at a service provider.

In HIFIS 4, that all changed. The default configuration for HIFIS 4 is that it's hosted on a website that anyone can access if they have the URL. Then all they need is a username and password.

The Olden Days

In the olden days (i.e. a few months ago), communities could set a default password (the factory default …