Custom application development is one of AIS’ many strong suits, and we’re constantly expanding our repertoire. Recently we successfully delivered a custom-designed scorecard and dashboard, as well as a SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) data cube, which provided self-service Business Intelligence for one of the nation’s leading pain medication monitoring organizations. Ameritox’ senior management required a user friendly solution that was consumable on a variety of mobile devices like Apple iPads and other tablets. Our experience in Microsoft BI, .NET development and mobile solutions enabled us to deliver a solution that allows the organization to effectively track their specimens on a daily basis.
Background
Ameritox Ltd. was originally founded in 1996 as Universal Toxicology Laboratories (UTL), a federally certified urine drug testing facility and medical examiner toxicology laboratory. Ameritox is the nation’s leader in pain medication monitoring, offering laboratory services and practice management tools to help clinicians coordinate and optimize the care of chronic pain patients. This process goes beyond standard urine drug testing to help clinicians assess whether patients are taking their medications correctly.
The Challenge
Ameritox was looking for a means to track the number of specimens on a daily basis. Trends were presented both nationally and based on custom geographic regions that Ameritox defined. The dashboard was used both strategically and operationally.
- Strategically: The dashboard would address underperforming/overperforming regions by drilling into zip code areas and seeing the root area(s).
- Operationally: If the numbers were down, that would alert senior management to a problem within days as opposed to the previous weekly feedback that they would receive. Since the process was automated, management no longer had to wait for a report to be prepared.
Solution
After initial collaborative meetings it was determined that AIS would develop a BI Dashboard, based on joint mock-ups, which would leverage third party controls for the generation of charts. At the conclusion of this project, Ameritox would have an SSAS data cube that could be used for self-service.
AIS designed a solution that would pull data from each of the laboratories and amass it into the corporate data warehouse. The data is processed and tagged into dimensionality that is specific to Ameritox such as business days (time), regions (geographic) and laboratories. A custom SSAS data cube was built from the data warehouse and processed on a nightly basis.
The data cube is used for the underlying data source to the custom developed, ASP.NET-based dashboard that both presents a scorecard of KPI’s and also allows drilling into the data by several dimensions. The fully-supported solution was designed to be both fault-tolerant and highly available. In addition to utilization of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to ensure a broad reach across a variety of device form-factors, the solution presented a front-end that was compatible with desktop machines and iPads alike.
Business and Technical Achievements
As a result of this successful deployment, AIS was able to assist the agency with the development of a self-service BI tool which included custom special controls based on the organization’s unique geographic boundaries. To date, it has been reported that the project was a complete success.
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AIS leveraged its resources and extensive experience with Microsoft Business Intelligence and .NET development to build a dashboard that is fully functional and extendable to a mobile (iPad) platform.
Technology
- iPad Safari (Webkit)
- Microsoft SQL Server 2010
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
- Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3.0
- HTML/CSS/JavaScript