Lantana Group Blog

Kristin Schrock, Technical Writer

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…

U.S. Antibiotic Awareness Week (USAAW) raises awareness about appropriate antimicrobial use and the threat of antimicrobial resistance. More than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result.[1] Improving antimicrobial use improves the treatment of infections, protects patients from preventable harms from antimicrobials, and…

Transitioning from a corporate office space to working from home has been great—a millennial’s dream. Instead of having to leave for work in the morning and battling rush hour, I have the luxury of getting up and going downstairs to log into my computer. When I first discovered I’d be working from home, I imagined…

Lantana has engaged in standards development and deployment for over ten years and supported the development of over 70 specifications. We were pleased to take the opportunity to respond and contribute comments on the 2019 Interoperability Standards Advisory (ISA) issued by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC). Our key recommendations…

My healthcare IT journey began in 1988 when I accepted a clerical position in the Ambulatory Care department at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada. The department was implementing a new computerized Patient Registration system, which I learned relatively easily, and I was intrigued with the accuracy and efficiency of this new process. The new system allowed for more precise patient scheduling and the ability to view all outpatient clinic activity. I wanted to learn more, so I took classes on Computerized Business Systems and Programming at Ryerson University in the evenings, while working at the hospital in the daytime.

I grew up in rural northern Ohio playing outside and exploring the countryside—rain, snow, or sunshine. I loved being outside, active, and just playing in the dirt. I also loved school, especially biology and art class. I was good at both. I was expected to go to college, while my best friend joined the Army.…

As a teen, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said a doctor. In high school, my favorite classes were biology and human anatomy, and I enjoyed listening to and helping people. As a summer lifeguard, I enjoyed the feeling of saving lives and keeping people safe. (Yes, I did actually save people during my tenure! Learning to swim is a life-saving skill!) Becoming a doctor seemed like a logical career path.

In May, I attended the CleanMed conference in Nashville where professionals from across the industry including clinicians, architects, hospital administrators, policy consultants, sustainability officers, hospital vendors and a very nice veterinary specialist discussed sustainability in their healthcare institutions.

When I was growing up, I wanted to become a veterinarian because I love animals. However, when I was twelve, my grandfather, who had a chronic health condition, came down with influenza A and passed away after only three days in the hospital. As my family sat with him, the nurses came in to monitor his condition frequently to make him comfortable. Their compassionate care to him was wonderful, but they didn’t just care for him.