Showing schedules for several providers at once

[drgarytraub]

I am attempting to create a feature to my scheduler that will allow a QUICK display of the schedules of 4 or 5 providers for a particular day all on the same screen. I have attempted several approaches to this, but they are all less than ideal - the biggest problem is that there is at least a several second (or longer delay). While this might seem trivial, I have seen other programs on the market do this instantaneously. I assume these are written in database languages as well (I may be wrong), so is there an approaqch in Alpha that can do this efficiently? I would really appreciate some discussion of this. Thanks in advance.

Gary Traub

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Showing schedules for several providers at onc

Perhaps if you describe some of the approaches you've attempted maybe some of us could suggest ways to speed them up?

Are you trying to display the information in a form... in a report?

-- tom

[drgarytraub]

RE: Showing schedules for several providers at onc

Hi Tom:

Well here are some of the approaches:

(1) On a form, there are 4 embedded browses. The user enters the date to display, and for each browse enters the providere date and the 2nd provider to browse32. A button is pressed that then does a query using the date and the 1st provider and displays that to browse1, the date and the 2nd provider to browse2, etc.
This works but takes a few seconds.

(2) On a form, create MANY variables like:
GT AW
8:00 am 0800amprov1 0800amprov2
8:15 am 0815amprov1 0815amprov2

this would result in MANY variables to expand the table to hold all the available time slots incremented by 15 minutes each and for each provider. Then, queries read the patient name into the appropriate time/provider slot. Works, but SLOW.

Any ideas???

Gary

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Showing schedules for several providers at onc

I wonder if it would be possible to position four independent browses on your display concurrently? Each could include a filter expression tied to a provider using a global variable. Your script could load and display them one after the other. If the size and position of each were figured out you could avoid having them land on top of each other. Each would be independently scrollable, and would be sorted in order by date and appointment time. I'm not thinking of a single form which occupies the whole display area. I'm not referring to embedded browses. I'm thinking of four separate browses, displayed simultaneously.

Is this crazy?

-- tom

[Finian Lennon]

RE: Showing schedules for several providers at onc

Hi Gary:

There may be other approaches that will work AND give acceptable performance but, after a lot of experimentation, I felt that the only satisfactory solution is a table that contains a column or columns, for each provider. The obvious limitation is that you are limited to the number of fields you can put in a table, and you must build the calendar table of appointments and then fill in the blanks, so to speak. Once you do this you can instantly display the provider columns very nicely in browses in any combination you wish.

Typically our clients choose to have 3 columns for each provider. Obviously you are limited by screen space on what can be seen simultaneoulsy, but if you are assigning just 1 column per provider, you could probably show four or five on one screen without much difficulty.

The offer is still open if you want to take a look. Drop me an e-mail.

Finian