My E-Health Records Portal Development
Operational Requirements
Customer wanted a flexible system to act as an electronic repository of medical records of patients with capabilities for data entry as well as uploading of images of physical records. The solution was to be delivered in two flavors, offline mode without Internet connectivity for organizational customers and online hosted mode for all customers with Internet access. The user interface must be context based depending on organization and user privileges. The customer also insisted on a Patient Lab Test Form Builder application to add functionality for new lab test records to the portal in a self-sufficient manner without dependency on development.
Approach
- Understood customer’s business model and service approach
- Recommended Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework for development
- Designed the database for support of data entry/update/view capabilities for doctor’s visit, hospitalization, health checkup, lab tests results and surgeries
- Designed an architecture to cater to different types of organizations (hospitals, doctors, corporate, diagnostics centers, individual users) and different types of users (admin with read-write and user with read-only privileges)
Solution Delivered
- RoR based application (hosted as well as offline on an MS-Windows PC) with MySQL database
- RoR based Form Builder application to generate Patient Lab Test Forms in the main portal
- Use of advanced RoR techniques to add/replace/view/delete attachments to medical records
- Use of multiple forms pertaining to different tables in one GUI screen
- Online user registration using forms with security images and e-mail notifications to reduce hacker attacks to portal site
- Offline registration of users by administrator for institutional customers
Value Proposition
- Solution architecture based on customer’s business model and service operations
- Scalable and efficient database design and attachments storage scheme for large number of online users
- Modular design with RoR framework for fast turn around to meet evolving requirements
- Personalized touch by dynamically integrating logo of customer organization upon user login
- Context sensitive menus and navigation depending on customer organization and user types
- Bigger picture perspective leading to feasibility of additional services for a turn-key solution of e-health records
Technologies
- Ruby on Rails, Web 2.0
- Linux, MS-Windows XP
- MySQL
- Ruby Gems, html, css
