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Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Savvy Support: Activities and Parties

MerusCase operates in a web browser, meaning our cloud-based servers do all of your case management heavy lifting. We can do things like sort and search through thousands of contacts or create documents with information from several areas of a case , all in the space of a second or two. 

As with any website, like Youtube or Facebook, you'll have a better experience if you have a reasonably modern computer and a reasonably quick internet connection. MerusCase isn't media-heavy like Facebook or Youtube, so our performance requirements are pretty modest by comparison. Still, if your computer or internet connection slows to a crawl, you can start to get unpredictable behavior in any website, including MerusCase.

We had a user email in with a plea for help finding the right parties in a case. Instead of the 10-12 expected parties, there were dozens of parties with unfamiliar names. We logged in to their support account to take a look, but the case looked fine to us, and the user reported the problem disappeared when they checked on it later.

This user emailed in again a short while later, noting the same issue had cropped up in a different case. It took a screenshot and a description of the names before we were able to figure out what was happening. The image above (scrubbed of any protected/confidential information) is a screenshot a different user sent to us, illustrating the same problem: Activities appearing in the Parties section.

Information in the MerusCase database is stored in table rows and columns. Some parts of MerusCase, like Activities and Browse Contacts, also show as tables, but other parts, like Parties and Injuries, are displayed differently to make them easier to understand. Row 1 in the Parties table is turned in to a party box, and so on. 

This user noted that their office's internet was pretty slow that day, and we were able to form a reasonably good idea of what had happened: an internet connection "hiccup" probably happened when the user was switching from Parties to Activities, so the contents of the Activities table loaded while the Party table view was still in effect. 

Thanks to our HIPAA compliance, we here at Fuery Solutions are all on relatively modern computers with drive encryption, so we didn't have computers slow enough to reproduce this. Even on slower computers, this kind of bad behavior requires the perfect storm of fast clicking and a slow connection to happen, so it took us viewing the problem first-hand to discover the root of a problem.

Luckily, this rare and complex problem has a simple solution. We advised the user to refresh the page, pulling in a fresh copy of the tables and table display rules.
Posted by MerusCase on Wednesday February 12, 2014 0 Comments

Labels: HIPAA

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