Communication Director, Bed Stat and Data Express

Usage Tracking Frequently Asked Questions

Usage tracking (also referred to as telemetry) is a set of tools that provides Forward Advantage insight into the performance and health of your software and system.


Data from the system is sent to Forward Advantage to provide more insight into performance and general system health. This feature uses Microsoft Azure to collect metric and log data.

The following have usage tracking functionality:
  • Communication Director, Bed Stat, and Data Express version 4.1 with support for Chrome and Edge
  • Communication Director API for MEDITECH Expanse (aka: MEDITECH Expanse Forward Advantage Faxing Enhancement)
  • Communication Director DesktopFax Document Upload API
Communication Director, Bed Stat, and/or Data Express specific metrics and system metrics such as system environment metrics and logs, CPU utilization, API performance, SQL performance, and memory utilization are collected.
Yes, contact us if you would like to have usage tracking turned off.
There are many benefits to usage tracking, including:
  • Better analysis of bug reports and the positive impact of improvements delivered through software updates.
  • More accurate identification of CPU capacity requirements.
  • More accurate recommendations for memory requirements.
No, this functionality does not collect PHI. The usage tracking functionality includes system and performance metrics, as well as system and application logs that never include PHI. Special logs were created to only include messages that are free from any PHI.
Forward Advantage will be able to identify the following from usage tracking data:
  • Storage utilization
  • Depth of process queues
  • Indicators of service failures
  • Certification expiration dates
  • Database fragmentation
  • Compliance with minimum server versions
  • Application version/updates applied to the server

Below is an overview of our security measures:


Collection

The usage tracking functionality goes to great lengths to protect the integrity and performance of the server by:

  • Never collecting PHI in any of the tracked metrics and logs.
  • Using read-only methods to collect data, whether from Operating System sources such as WMI or issuing SQL statements.
  • Encrypted configuration and credentials, maintaining the integrity of the data collection, and protecting access.


Storage

  • Data at rest is stored encrypted in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. See Microsoft’s Azure Monitor and the Azure Trust Center for more information.
  • We have a data retention policy and only store data for the lifetime of its usefulness, which is typically no longer than 1 year.


Access

  • Forward Advantage leverages Azure Active Directory identifiers and role-based access controls (RBAC) so only those with a need to know can access data.
Most data is aggregated, high-level information that does not correlate to a user. In the Communication Director API for MEDITECH Expanse (aka: MEDITECH Expanse Forward Advantage Faxing Enhancement), some MEDITECH activity includes the MEDITECH identity initiating the activity.
The data is only accessible by Forward Advantage personnel who have a need-to-know based on their job duties.

The system activity required for usage tracking is minimal. 

No, not at this time.  We will use the information to better serve our customers, however we will not be proactively monitoring the usage tracking data.