[Success Story] McCann Medical Matrix

My name is John McCann and I am an associate professor of Ophthalmology at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. Five years ago I completed a Filemaker Pro solution that converted the Division of Ophthalmic Plastic Surgery to a paperless environment.

Physicians from around the country as well as the doctors we trained began to ask about installing the solution in their practices to promote efficiency. I was interested in installing the program at other locations to facilitate multi-center clinical research. In order to install this product elsewhere I needed to convert to a solution that had the following properties

1. Could be written by a non-computer programmer in a RAD environment
2. Would look a lot like my existing Filemaker solution
3. A front end that could be supported, and updated from a distance
4. A back end that had widely available local support
5. Had complete separation of the data and the application
6. Support for end to end encryption
7. Support for an audit-trail
8. A zero deployment client

I considered many different applications and decided on Servoy as it met all of the above needs. I began converting my Filemaker Pro solution at the beginning of this year. I met with Bob Cusick about once a month for advice and got a great deal of help from the Servoy Forum. I have a busy medical practice, run a Department of Ophthalmology at one of UCLA's affiliated hospitals, and I travel a lot to give talks about eye plastic surgery. This left me every other weekend to work on the software project. Seven months after starting I had about 200 forms, 1000 methods, and 80 tables with several hundred relationships and several thousand fields. I was ready to begin importing 80 gigabytes of data including 160,000 JPEG and PDF files that I formerly stored outside of the Filemaker database.

The current Servoy solution is comprehensive handling every aspect of the practice formerly managed on paper forms. The patient demographics, referring physician's demographics, all aspects of the medical examination, and surgery scheduling are stored in the solution. To save physician time the database is integrated with a transcription service so we can dictate a summary that is automatically transcribed and placed in the medical record. We even have an interface for messaging between employees and doctors so that this information can be transmitted in a secure fashion that is HIPPA compliant.

The solution stores before and after JPG images of the patient. Every patient related piece of paper our practice receives is converted to a PDF document and stored in the solution. The solution also has forms that link it to the internet so we can easily access data from outside the solution. We have a number of PowerPoint presentations stored inside of the solution that we show to patients to assist in describing their disease or upcoming surgery. We are also able to generate very professional looking reports that incorporate JPG images and HTML tables.

I am currently running my practice using the Servoy solution and have plans to begin installing it in other practice under the name "McCann Medical Matrix" before the end of the year.

Developing in Servoy has required me to learn JavaScript, SQL, and the Servoy Developer tool. I have listed some of the more important conclusions on developing in Servoy below.

1. A person who understands a lot about their data and a little about programming can write a very clean professional looking application with Servoy.
2. The Servoy Development Team listens to their clients and implements software fixes and enhancements at a mind boggling pace.
3. Given the improvements in Servoy between 1.0 and now it would probably take me half as much time to write my solution if I started today instead of 7 months ago.
4. Complete separation of the data and the solution markedly improves the supportability of my solution.
5. Servoy is a near ideal environment for writing electronic health care record applications.
6. The speed of my Servoy application is already on par with my Filemaker Solution.
7. Given the power of a SQL backend I can ask the solution to perform queries that add richness to the solution that I could not have achieved in Filemaker.
8. My Servoy interface which is less than one year old is much cleaner and more professional looking than my Filemaker Solution was after seven years.
9. Potential clients see it as a positive that I have chosen to use SQL as a backend for their mission critical data
10. It is easy to find local support for backend databases like Microsoft SQL Server.
11. Storing all data inside the database simplifies backup and maintenance of data.
12. It was a very good decision to move my solution into the Servoy environment.

I have objectively investigated the impact of running The Division of Ophthalmic Plastic Surgery at UCLA in a paperless environment and found it to be overwhelmingly positive. The solution we use allows us to do a better job of taking care of our patients, improves education of doctors in training, improves our ability to do medical research, doubles the productivity of our non-physician employees, and saves our practice approximately $200,000 a year and assist in increasing revenue by giving our practice a more polished appearance.