Data Management

Relational Databases

The database that I use for most of our data management needs is Postgres. 

However, I have worked with multiple relation databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQLServer, Microsoft Access and MySQL and developed several programs to improve how novice users can work with these various databases.  Software applications include Patient-X which acts a user-friendly ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) application for transferring data between different relational databases and Meta data Repository (MDR) which helps in enhanced database documentation (including database content).

Document Indexing

We have used the Apache Lucene database for our management of text documents (medical references and PDF documents).  Lucene is an open source project for helping in the indexing and retrieval of text information.

Software Development

Meta Data Repository

A Meta Data Repository (MDR) acts a information management system for the structure and contents of a database system.  A MDR differs from a Data Dictionary in that the MDR also describes the content within the columns of the database itself.  As relational databases turn into legacy systems the content within these databases changes.  this may take the form of adding, modifying or eliminating  coded elements within the database.  Over time these changes are often lost.  

Based on previous experience from multiple database projects in multiple countries, this became a significant issue as the information about the database content was often contained by the database administrator who would need to be queried when the database was access to ensure that the right information was being asked for.  

We developed a system called the “Meta Data Repository” (MDR) that can access a variety of relational databases, queries the database schema, table and column structure and content and prepares a report that can be edited for proper documentation of the database.  

More information about MDR (version 1.0) can be found at:
http://www.healthcaresimulations.com/MetaData.html

Patient-X

Patient-X is a light-weight hetergenous database transfer application taht addresses many of the issues surrounding the transfer of patient information.  Patient-X supports the following databases: Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres and Excel/CSV.  

More information about Patient-X (version 3.0) can be found at:
http://www.healthcaresimulations.com/Patient-X.html

VizQL

The Visual Query Language (VizQL).  VizQL is a database query system that uses Augmented reality to query a database using cards.

The purpose of this  project was to look to see how we could work with children and have an interactive method for querying relational databases.  An Example of this might be putting the cards for “Women” and “Malawi” and the system would recognize the cards, project a 3D model above the cards and then display the results of How many Women are in Malawi (query from the database).