When you can have a non-programmer develop an entire data collection and reporting system in a day, you have exponentially speed up your development cycles

Kjeld Molvig leads the group of the internal development staff for San Francisco Department of Public Health. He has been in IT for 30 years, primarily in software development projects.

My group is the internal development staff for San Francisco Department of Public Health. I have been in IT for 30 years, primarily in development projects. We develop for Microsoft platform: IIS, ASP, SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008.

We are expanding ASPRunner generated pages throughout the organization. In general, our department is responsible for reporting. In the past, we generated reams of green bar print outs and had them delivered to departments throughout the organization. The next step was generating Excel spreadsheets and making them available to departments via the network shares. The new model is to generate essentially the same information, and make it available thru the web. It is much easier for us and the users prefer the functionality of the applications generated by ASPRunner.

I have other tools that I can use to generate ASPRunner-like pages. But the beauty of this product is, that I can hand it off to our staff that aren't developers and wouldn't know how write a single line of html or VB. They don't have to. Just using the ASPRunner UI, they generate powerful reporting sites and even include data collection forms as needed.

Myself and one other programmer do the custom code pieces. The other 4 I/S staff use them. Most of the custom code is around providing a full audit trail based on the Active Directory accounts. In addition, we add dynamic links inside ASPRunner pages to take users to the pages in other applications.

In our setting, it is difficult to put a dollar figure on it's impact. Rather, we have added so much functionality to our reporting services, and taken it to places we never would have considered in the past. We now deliver the same information, but over the web instead of paper, and it can be sorted, filtered and even exported into Excel files. And when you can have a non programmer develop an entire data collection and reporting system in a day, you have exponentially improved your development cycle.

I think our most dramatic applications have been a series of clinical worklists that we have integrated directly into San Francisco General Hospital's electronic medical records (EMR). Users of our Siemens EMR access the seamlessly intergrated ASPRunner generated worklists not even knowing they are leaving the EMR application. These worklists allow the nursing staff to track a variety of key clinical indicators by patient and bed throughout the Hospital in real time. Once again, these worklists were developed by a non-programmer. Here is pic of how the ASPRunner runs inside the Siemens Lifetime Clinical Record at San Francisco General Hospital.

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