Children's Activity Data

Northampton NHS Trust
Northamptonshire, UK

NHS Trust administers national health services operations for multiple hospitals and other medical facilities across Northamptonshire. The application tracks referrals, emergency contacts, and health history for every children's department within the organization.

Secretaries, nurses and doctors access CAD to perform a variety of administrative tasks, including adding or editing patient records and updating patient contacts and referrals (i.e. patient history). Once logged in, they are presented with a simple search page to look up existing customers. If a patient already has a CAD record, users can edit patient details, view referrals and update related contacts via a Contact page. Admins use the Contact page to create records for new NHS Trust patients as well. On this page, various drop down lists are automatically filtered based on the administrator's previous selections to minimize data-entry errors.

CAD patient search screen

Managers have complete, unrestricted access to CAD. They use the application to manage users, delete or edit high priority patient information, or pull custom reports. Managers may assign user roles, create new application users, reset passwords, restrict another manager's access or modify the data appearing in CAD drop down lists.

CAD Edit Contact screen

Application size and scope

CAD is comprised of three Microsoft SQL Server databases with 21 database tables, seven database views, and 30 web pages. The Contacts table is the largest database table in CAD and holds information about every Northampton NHS patient.

Approximately 50 staff members process 1,000 transactions each month. Transactions include adding patient records, referrals, contacts, and procedures to CAD.

The project

The project was completed in one month. The Iron Speed Designer portion of the project took two weeks.

Code extensions and customizations

There are approximately 2,000 lines of custom code in the application. I did most of the customization on my own in about two weeks.

Major customizations include:

	Enhanced Search The search box on the front page has been heavily customized to give users a range of search options. For example, users can search for part of a name while searching for an exact date of birth.
	Dynamic Drop-Down Lists The application makes use of dynamic filtering drop down lists. It hides and displays fields based on the selected value of another field.
	Auto-Populated Fields Code has been added to auto populate fields based on a user's previous search when adding a new patient.

A third-party tool called Syncfusion was incorporated to create patient wristbands. The tool auto-populates patient information from the database into a Microsoft Word document and gives users the ability to convert to PDF.

CAD Show Referral screen

Page layout customizations

We used the standard Matterhorn page style in Iron Speed Designer with several minor changes to the CSS. Most CAD pages display multiple tables, including at least two show tables.

Iron Speed Designer impact

Using Iron Speed Designer saved two person-months of development time and $28,000. The project would have taken three months to complete without Iron Speed Designer.

While it would have been feasible to build CAD by hand, the extra time required would have compromised the quality of the finalized application. Iron Speed Designer allowed us to spend the rest of our development time enhancing CAD before moving on to the next project.

Next steps

We continue to add and improve features in CAD based on user feedback. Updates range from simple modifications to the page layout to adding new validation checks for users.

We've deployed new additional NHS Trust applications using the framework created for CAD. Each application is slightly modified to meet individual department requests.

About the developer

Ben Demes holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Essex and is a professional member of the British Computer Society (MBCS). Ben has been instrumental in completing a number of web applications for NHS in the UK. Working against tight deadlines, he just loves working with Iron Speed Designer. Ben's skill set extends to programming in C#, VisualBasic.NET and JavaScript and working on data migration scripts for Microsoft SQL Server.