This application serves as a central data depository for all data collected during each pulmonary outpatient and inpatient study visit. Faculty, fellows, and clinical trials staff members in the Division of Internal Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine use this application on a daily basis. This application ties into the existing Medical Center Information Warehouse to pre-populate data elements thereby increasing accuracy and efficiency of data.

Users access theh portal in a wireless environment on a PC Tablet. A user logs into the application (Fig 1) and depending on his/her level of authentication, is given a list of specialty areas (inpatient or outpatient) or reports from they can select (Fig 2). Within these specialty areas are different study specific data entry applications that are also available based on the user’s access level.

If a user selects an Outpatient specialty area, they are taken to the Outpatient Registration System (Fig 3). Here the user has the option to search for a patient using their MRN (Medical Record Number) or select a tab for a particular outpatient study. The Outpatient Registration Systems allows the user to enter new patients into our system or edit already existing patient data (Fig 4). This patient Registration system is used to track all patients involved in Outpatient research studies. If a user selects a tab, they are taken to a study patient census page (Fig 5). From this page the user can select a patient for entering study- specific data (Fig 6 and Fig 7).

If a user selects an Inpatient specialty area, they are taken to the inpatient patient census (Fig 8). From the inpatient census page the user can select a patient and enter general and demographic data or select a tab for a particular inpatient study (Fig 9). If a user selects a tab for a particular study, they are taken to a study patient census page (Fig 10). From this page the user can select the patient and enter study-specific data.

The Pulmonary Translational Core Portal is a new application based on an existing paper system. Previously, if a clinical trial had 200 elements they would be manually entered in a Microsoft Word document. At the end of the trial someone would convert these to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then hand import these elements to a database within the Enterprise Information Warehouse at the hospital. Today, this application has eliminated the use of Excel spreadsheets altogether. Now all of the information is entered directly into the database. This makes patient information much more accessible and allows the staff to analyze the results of each study through implementation of third-party statistical tools such as SAS.

There are over 7,000 lines of custom code in the application including these code customizations:

• Security – integrated with an enterprise identity management solution (LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). We used our own custom security model for page- level security access.
• Client Side Scripting – We added client side scripting (JavaScript) to handle complex business logic. Also added was a specialized class to make sure changes made by the business logic (client side scripting) were seen by Iron Speed when data is submitted to the database on the server side. This class also contains code that inserted a blank option for all dropdown lists in the Iron Speed Designer-generated Edit Record pages. This allowed those dropdown lists to be unselected.
• Code Telescope – Several pages utilized the Code Telescope in Iron Speed Designer to re-bind data to tables when a page post- commit transaction occurs. This was done to display data that was saved to the database. We also used the Code Telescope to add specific URL data onto links for each record control when it was created.
• Error Handling – Modified the base classes in the generated application to allow custom error messages to be displayed.
• Redirect – Modified the safe classes to append custom URL variables at the end of a URL string.
• Record manipulations – We modified Show Table records to dynamically display images links with custom URLs.
• Database Security – We added code to the base classes to access the database to set Oracle user roles. The Oracle user roles are used to establish the logged in users access to database objects.
• Calculations – A few pages contain code that pull manually entered data, perform calculations and place the answers into the form.
• Web Services – We added pre-existing web services to the portal for authentication (for login), database access (for specialized queries to pull data from the database) and application usage (to track who and how many users are using our application).
• PDF Display page – We created pages to upload and/or download PDF files to and from our database.
• Page Load Events – Several pages contain methods that will modify text and set variables on the Page Load event.

While we did not directly incorporate third-party tools into this project, its users have discovered that Iron Speed Designer makes it incredibly easy to integrate advanced third-party statistical reporting tools into the application. Users need this software at the end of a study in order to evaluate and report the data collected throughout their study.

We have proposed this portal to several other research groups in the hospital including the Cardiovasular Imaging Group.

We will be adding more users and deploying additional sites going forward. This application and user group will grow with every new research grant that is taken on by a member of the Pulmonary Translational Core Group.

Jessica Backer holds a B.S. in Information Technology from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Jessica has extensive experience with developing and implementing Coldfusion systems. Most recently we worked with The Strong Hospital at the University of Rochester to design and developer their Coldfusion system.

Ryan Deiter has B.S. in Computer Science from Northern Michigan University. He previously worked as an independent contractor for Cray Inc. where he was responsible for implementing and designing diagnosis software for Beowulf clusters. This required writing UNIX kernel modules that monitored sensors on each blade in the cluster.

Chris Waugh has a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from DeVry University. He previously worked for Columbus Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) where he analyzed their scheduling system to maximize efficiency and Buckeye Elite Showcase Tournament where he developed a web application to register teams and players.

Bryan Ball graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.S. in Computer Science. Most recently he upgraded Tempur-Pedic Inc.’s entire EDI infrastructure to work with Oracle 11i Applications using VB.NET, XML, and PL/SQL. He has experience with the functional design, implementation, testing, and troubleshooting of health care information software products in a client-server environment using Visual C++.

Felix Liu has over 10 years of Development experience in various languages, 5 of which where spent as a Database Administrator (Informix, Oracle). He has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Tulane University. Felix has served as a System Administrator on almost every flavor of UNIX systems.