Extended Choice
Background
The Department of Health commissioned Dr Foster to produce a series of booklets for Foundation Trusts and ISTCs (Independent Sector Treatment Centres) who are part of the Government's National Menu of Choice initiative, an initiative aimed at providing patients with more information about services provided by hospitals so that they may make more informed choices about where to have treatment performed.
These booklets explain some background information about the Trust and treatments it provides and details the individual hospitals within the Trust that perform those treatments. The hospital details include a photo, location details and transport links.
In order to create the booklets, Dr Foster first needed to capture the data and I built the Extended Choice data capture application to facilitate that process. Unfortunately the timescales for this project were unreasonably short (a little under two weeks for the entire application), so I was unable to properly architect the system before building it. As a result there was much to-ing and fro-ing in the latter stages of development, which could have been minimised with better planning.
How the system works
The system is built using ASP.NET 2.0 and C#, and the backend is a SQL Server 2000 database. A representative from each Foundation Trust and ISTC needed to fill in the details for their organisation, so the system makes use of the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership API, providing each Trust with its own unique login, and an admin login for overseeing the process and troubleshooting any issues arising during the data capture period itself. The administrator could also keep track of those Trusts who had not yet logged in to the system and entered their hospitals' details.
The application itself is built using a number of bespoke web controls specifically written for it, but also makes use of some generic database access libraries that I had previously written. Once the Trust representative is happy with the data they have entered for their hospitals, they may submit the data to Dr Foster, which automatically generates a PDF of their data, including hospital photos, and emails it to the representative and to contacts at Dr Foster.
The representative then has one week to review the data and go back into the system and amend it. Once they are happy and have submitted the data for a second time, a second PDF is generated as before and they are then locked out of the system so that they cannot make further changes to their data.