Lantana Group Blog

Kristin Schrock, Technical Writer

Following our annual retreat in November 2019, Lantana created the Diversity and Inclusion Group (DIG) to promote policy changes and encourage diversity and inclusion company wide. We came up with the idea for the DIG during the retreat gallery walk session on the topic of Community. This discussion sparked interest in a focused effort on…

One morning, a happy email from Marte, our Administrative Guru & Event Coordinator, popped into my inbox about trees: “From our items we have ordered from Eco Promotions, they have planted another tree on our behalf.” My first thought was, “Cool,” and my second thought was, “Wait. Another tree? We have more?” Among Marte’s many…

The planning for our annual Company Retreat this year started out just like every other year. We had our dates and our location, and we were working on logistics (food, daytime activities, nighttime activities, room accommodations, meeting room details, etc.). Then COVID-19 came. We continued to press forward with planning, since we were still several…

In honor of U.S. Antibiotic Awareness Week (USAAW) and Lantana’s continued partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we provide an update on the nation’s primary system for tracking inpatient antibiotic use and resistance: The National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) Antimicrobial Use and Resistance (AUR) Module. USAAW is an annual week-long observance…

Networking and server infrastructure are complex and made of many moving parts. It’s my job to ensure those parts work together seamlessly and efficiently. Put simply, server engineering/administration consists of setting up servers that host applications, or “serve” them to the world (i.e., websites, email servers, file servers, etc.) and network engineering/administration consists of making…

Hola! Me llamo Malissa y soy de El Paso, Texas! Translation: Hello, my name is Malissa and I’m from El Paso, Texas! As a Mestiza woman, I am very proud to work for Lantana within the Health IT sector. A Mestiza is a woman of mixed race with indigenous and Spanish descent. My mother is…

October is Health Literacy Month! Health literacy seems more important now than ever, with multiple sources identifying poor health literacy as a barrier to COVID-19 response efforts. John Zarocostas identified COVID-19 as an “infodemic” as much as a pandemic.

Lantana is a distributed company, meaning all employees work remotely. Working from home has a lot of advantages: cost savings for both the company and employee, a smaller carbon footprint due to lack of a commute, and never having to wear real pants again (okay, sometimes we change out of our pajamas). Unfortunately, working from…

Diversity is defined as variety, the condition of having or being composed of differing elements (traits and characteristics that make people unique); while Inclusion is defined as the act or practice of including and accommodating people who have historically been excluded because of their race, religion, age, sex, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, or…

What is one thing we can do to improve the use of health information? Our team weighs in. Missed our last vlog? Check it out here.

Navigating the healthcare system can be overwhelming during the best of times, but it’s even more challenging during a public health crisis. Seeing the impact on the news and reading about it are different than experiencing it. These are our stories of medical emergencies during the coronavirus crisis. Krisden’s experience – Patient Perspective On April…

This year is deemed the Year of the nurse to recognize the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth and the release of the World Health Organization’s first State of the World’s Nursing Report. The nurses at Lantana take great pride in the recognition that our profession has received for its major impact on healthcare worldwide.…

At our 2019 Retreat, our Communication & Channel Manager asked for volunteers to answer questions about the company. This vlog, which we are releasing on our Fifteenth Anniversary, resulted from one such question. It’s our anniversary gift to ourselves and hope you all enjoy it as well.

The world is different. Maybe your feelings are a grab bag of spiraling anxiety, anger, fear, relief, loneliness, and grief, and your usual coping skills aren’t available right now. After a particularly rough shelter-in-place week, a friend recommended I get a walk in (past the mailbox) for a good twenty minutes and take a good,…

Advice from the Work from Home “Experts” at Lantana Consulting Group Lantana’s employees always work remotely, since 2005. After all that time working from home, we have some advice to share in light of the remote work mandates sweeping the nation due to COVID-19. 1. Get ready for work in the morning We’ll admit it:…

People talk a lot about the value of data. Data are described as an organization’s “most valuable asset” and “the new oil.” Maybe. The information tracked in client and administrative datasets offers insight into the best way to structure and deliver programs, learn from mistakes and successes, and maximize limited resources. But data can also…

In 2019, greenLantana made a big decision—to offset the environmental impact of our web presence. Lantana employees want to better their community and environment. We avoided the environmental impact of the brick and mortar office and work commute by becoming a distributed company, and we have a drive to further reduce our environmental impact. We…

The program took nearly 48 hours to run. On a tight timeline, this wasn’t ideal. Then we had to make several last-minute changes to the code right after our engineer went on parental leave. None of us knew enough about C# to confidently fix the code. Today things look quite different. The 48-hour task takes…

After working at Lantana Consulting Group for 11 months as a Project Coordinator, I was excited to experience my first Lantana retreat and meet my teammates. Since Lantana is a distributed company, I primarily communicate with coworkers via email, instant messaging, web meetings, and telephone. At the retreat, I connected face-to-face and put faces with…

I first thought SAS was a coding program used for cleaning up and validating large amounts of data and for generating reports. Since I had never coded before, it seemed too complicated, and I thought I could just use Excel as a data analysis tool. But SAS is more efficient than manually validating data or…