I have a question, these services you mention, Caspio and Zoho Creator, if I was to use their services to build a web app for paitient interaction fully hosted by them, would their service and security be sufficient in the eyes of HIPAA?

I want to create a custom app but not keep a web programmer in house for $90K per year salary when I can go with one of these services and do it much easier and without the added overhead.

Thanks for your input.

What’s worse is when a Customer does come to IT for help and IT management takes a pass and leaves them to their own devices because they’re “only Access files” or “only spreadsheets.”

I’d be interested in reading about how other healthcare IT professionals have overcome this prejudice against user-friendly/desktop applications that seems so pervasive in IT departments. Or is it something unique to my organization and its senior IT management?

I know, we all have bigger fish to fry. Databases need to be backed up, interfaces written, but without some kind of contact with the customer, “MSOffice bloat” can get seriously out of control. I’ve found that being out of touch is the #1 cause of this, and also the most easily remedied.

On the other hand, I’ve been banging this drum since the first day I started here. My predecessor was the “keeper of the Access databases” for my Customers, a mantle I inherited. One of the first things I proposed was bringing about a half-dozen individual Access databases under a common, front-end .mdb file and porting the tables and queries to a more robust back-end.

That proposal was shot-down because it sounded an awful lot like I was proposing custom application development and we don’t do that sort of thing here – or so said TPTB.

This dismissive mindset about Microsoft Office is the primary reason we still have a federated mess on our hands. Culturally, the “get-it-done-now” mentality about Access (and most other Office programs) is as persistent in IS as it is just about everywhere else. No one sees Access as a powerful application development tool, consequently the people most responsible for ensuring the management and integrity of applications, their data, and the processes that both support end up facilitating the degradation of all three.

There are many technical shortcomings of Access and Excel-bases applications that the tools you recommend would address. However, it’s been my experience that many organizations aren’t even at a place where they realize there are technical shortcomings to overcome because procedurally they’re lumping Office in with Post-It Notes and index cards.

As you said managing information is the most critical and very crucial for orgainisations. When the the information grows beyond control in 1000’s of files, it becomes tedious to manage them. Zoho Creator helps you manage your informations (data) online easily and very quickly.

On the other hand, we undertand that putting data onto the web is a security concern for some users, and they should be concerned about the privacy of their data as well as their personal information.

I would like to take this opportunity to explain all the readers out here that, our servers are located in a very secured environment. Firewalls and advanced security technologies are employed to prevent access from outside intruders. And your data can only be accessed by you and the users with whom you have shared your application with.

And if at all, you want to take your data with you, you can do it at anytime. Zoho Creator provides various exporting options like xls, pdf, html, csv and tsv.

Have you seen anything that you like designed specifically for non-tech end-users?