Client

Have a Heart Paisley aims to reduce heart disease and promote healthier, longer lives for the people of Paisley.

Launched in October 2000 as one of the Scottish Executive’s four national health demonstration projects, Have a Heart Paisley has now entered a second phase of activities. Applying lessons learned from activities to date, the project is delivering a programme of work aimed at those most at risk of developing heart disease and those who have already been diagnosed with heart problems. With its partners in the community, NHS and local authority, Have a Heart Paisley aims to demonstrate through this work, the degree to which preventive measures can improve heart health by tackling risk factors and unmet treatment needs.

Requirement

To establish an effective intranet, Have a Heart required specific goals to be addressed:

• Reduce excess user interface ‘noise’ and redundant data
• Ensure that users can easily navigate user records which vary enormously in length
• Ensure that non-technical users can easily and intuitively use the report without training

Solution

Etellect, in close collaboration with the team at Have a Heart, developed an intranet to encompass the following features:

• Consistent Have a Heart branding throughout the solution
• Clear presentation of data; for example ensuring that the name and dosage of drugs should be in different columns making the table clearer
• Interactive patient records
• Utilise CSS to facilitate user-selectable font sizes, as well as reducing bandwidth
• Colour coding utilised to allow for easy identification of data
• Split into low and high bandwidth versions: high bandwidth version to feature graphs to track blood pressure (for example) over time
• Use of a left navigation device in order to show current node/entire tree of user information
• Sorting / filter facility
• An option to group items e.g. medication list by name and not name on each row to improve clarity
• An option to show all data by date and then have child nodes under them i.e. 1st June 2002, diagnosis made + medication given
• Links to page explaining all acronyms used/a key/links to a glossary
• Essential patient information visible at all times,
• Ability to view all data

Benefits

Have a Heart now have a intranet solution that is much more user-friendly and efficient.  Additional benefits include;

• Allows use of higher-level .NET functionality, especially in terms of data manipulation, which is much more labour-intensive using ASP.
• Allows RAH to pilot a .NET project with minimal risk and the possibility of skills transfer and accelerated learning to RAH development staff.
• Provided a clean separation of concerns between Etellect and RAH - RAH provided Etellect with the current output from the Stored Procedures, from which Etellect then built the site. This avoided difficult and time-consuming Stored Procedure work.