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HIMSS Analytics collects and analyzes healthcare data relating to IT processes and environments,
products, IS department composition, costs and management metrics, healthcare trends and
purchasing decisions.
HIMSS Analytics is always looking for new and innovative ways to accurately and efficiently collect
data from the healthcare organizations and its officials in order to improve their product.
The volume of data elements and information HIMSS Analytics collects on each healthcare facility is
quite impressive. Live phone surveys/interviews or healthcare organization officials directly entering data
within a web-based application for such an array of healthcare applications is extremely time consuming and difficult
to delegate separately to individual experts within the organizational structure.
Digital Affinity recommended the use of a series of robust Microsoft Excel spreadsheets which can be downloaded,
filled out, and returned and imported into the HIMSS Analytics Database. Microsoft Excel's embedded support
for form elements/objects and Visual Basic allowed the form to preserve and insure data integrity much like
the counterpart web form versions.
In order to build this form, Digital Affinity had to solve two issues. For one, healthcare organizations
are surveyed each year, and with IT related process installations and usage spanning multiple years, it would
be extremely beneficial and timely to pre-fill the spreadsheet with the previous year's data so a user would
only complete new or changed data. The other issue is that the form questions and their answer options
are changing almost daily along with the ongoing flow of IT vendors and products within the industry.
Digital Affinity developed a process that created this robust spreadsheet on-the-fly using an installed
custom application we developed on the web server that implemented the latest form question options and
pre-filled the short survey question answers with the previous year's data based on the authenticated user.
The excel forms are being generated and downloaded multiple times daily and have a significant positive
impact on HIMSS Analytics' data collection process and the overal accuracy and fill-rate of their database.
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