Managing Data Using ColdFusion

Calvin LaiNov. 29, 2006

It all started with CHASE

In 2002, VCH contracted CFE to evaluate the impact of four new facilities: HCC, LSC, DCHC, PCHC setup by VCH as part of the Vancouver Agreement among three levels of government.

CHASE (Community Health And Safety Evaluation) was established and led by Dr. Mark Tyndall.

Three areas of primary interest:1. Communicable diseases incidence and prevalence rates including

HIV, Hepatitis A, B & C, tuberculosis, syphilis, and influenza. 2. Primary health care including the health status of DTES residents

and the proportion of residents receiving primary health care. 3. Access and movement within the health care system with a focus

on primary health care, hospital care, alcohol and drug counselling, sobering centres, detox, and long-term drug treatment.

DATA Components

Two main data components to this evaluation:1. DTES Community Statistics such as VPD crime stats,

Unemployment rates, Unemployment insurance, vital statistics.

2. Enroll 3-4 thousands DTES residents via a simple survey; ask for consent to link to other external health linkages such as PARIS, BCCDC, DTP and SPH ER.

One major advantage of data from linkages is these are hard data not self-reported ones.

Another advantage is getting prospective data with less $$ by skipping followups.

Challenges

Small budget, needs to control cost very effectively. 4 full time personnel: admin manager, database manager and two

research assistants. Admin manager and two RA worked in remote office at PCHC

(supported by VCH) and database manager at SPH. Admin manager in charge of recruiting CHASE cohort, setup peer

group who helped recruitment, writing reports and data entry. Peer support is an important piece as it involved the community to help

out in the project. Database manager responsible for setting database, running stats

analyses, setup website, provide systems and network support in the remote office and writing reports. http://chase.hivnet.ubc.ca

Need to pay VPD, BC Stats, Vital Stats for statistics requested for three year span 2002-2004

Need to pay $10 incentive for each participant.

Peer Group

How to keep cost down?

Hired minimum personnel – everyone had to multi-task. Used community peers. Monitored duplicates & triplicates closely since we paid $10 incentive: Required participants to show ID (photo ID, if possible). For checking, needed an updated recruited list at least daily I came up with the CF solution:

1. Needed NO extra HW (hence no extra $$) on my PC

2. PC already running W2K-PRO which came with IIS Internet Information Server (windows web server).

3. I just needed to install a free CF version the company distributed 6 years ago to get users hooked.

Once setup, the staff in remote office can get the recruited list real time.

Security issues

Security is a huge issue as it involved confidential info.

Employed three layers of security:

1. ID/PW protection on the website

2. IP-restriction

3. Special web port assignment eg. http://chase.hivnet.ubc.ca:7778

CHASE and after

This technology is so cost effective that it is deployed in subsequent cohorts: SEOSI, ARYS, MAKA, ACCESS and VIDUS2 :

Cohort Period N Full Cohort Name

1. CHASE 2002- 3500 Community Health And Safety Evaluation

2. SEOSI 2003- 1000 Scientific Evaluation of Supervised Injecting

3. MAKA 2004- 250 Not an acronym, First Nations' languages for all women and/or healing women

4. ARYS 2005- 500 At Risk Youth Study

5. ACCESS 2005- 500 AIDS Care Cohort to Evaluate Exposure to Survival Services

6. VIDUS2 2005- 1000 Vancouver Injection Drug User Study

What is ColdFusion?

Popular web application server that generates dynamic database driven web pages.

Middleware that communicates with the database, processes data and then display the results on the web.

Based on an scripting language called ColdFusion Markup Language which compares to JSP or PHP and resembles HTML in syntax

CF web pages always has file extension .cfm simliar to .html in HTML web pages.

How ColdFusion works?

What so good about ColdFusion?

Based on HTML codes and extended to include SQL for handling databases.

Communicates to all popular databases such as Oracle, MYSQL, Windows SQL, MSAccess and even Excel via ODBC driver or specialized drivers.

Coding in CF is very efficient – compared to say windows ASP. Rapid Development. Fast Speed for web display. Drill down feature. Copy/Paste data on web into Excel directly.

Some CF examples:

ARYS TRACKING One click on variable link sort the data by that variable, eg. Sorting

by FU1 date will indicate who are due for FU2. Drill-down feature: if you click on one specific ID, it will automatically

print out all the detailed info about this particular – useful for staff to track down participants for followups.

Retrieve data into excel by simple copy/paste.

History of CF:

1995 Allaire started ColdFusion 2001 Macromedia bought out CF 2005 Adobe bought out Macromedia including CF 2005 10th Anniversary

Some CF websites:

1. http://www.medicine.ubc.ca/index.cfm?content=divisions/divisions_directory.cfm

2. http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/realestate/index.cfm

3. http://www.students.ubc.ca/calender/index.cfm?page=deadlines

CF version and $$

CF Enterprise Version: US$5,999 CF Standard US$1,299 CF Developer Version – FREE everything runs on one PC

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/productinfo/product_editions/ Free and fully functional version of ColdFusion for local development

of applications that will be deployed on either Standard or Enterprise servers.

In addition to localhost, access to applications is now possible from two client machines, making team development even easier.