My agency has a nutrition program that serves 45 child care centers in 3 counties. They need to compile weekly meal counts on children served from each center by date, children served and each meal. They have been using a paper form but would like to do it online and have it set up with a formula to add the daily data together into a weekly total and then submit it the nutrition department.
Any ideas on how this could be done?
(I've thought of a web based form that would email the data but it doesnt have the capacity to run formulas and I'm trying to stay away from Excel attachments)
thanks!
m
You might want to look into
Google's Docs and Spreadsheets. You need a Gmail account to access the service. You can setup a spreadsheet with the calculations and then export the spreadsheet to HTML or PDF for easy emailing. (Note: I just looked into this today so I'm not real up on all the features.)
It looks like you can even take an existing Excel worksheet as a starting point by uploading it.
What you are asking for should not be too difficult to be done with a web form, but the complexity would be taken care of with some scripting that would run on the web server. If you can hook up with a programer it shouldn't take them too much work to provide what I think you are asking for.
The data can be entered into a form and then stored with a script on the server, either in a database file or a text file. When you need the totals, a second script could read the data, do the calculations, and send off the information in an email. The data could also be sent to someone who could then import it into Excel or another application.
It might be a good idea to brush up on your HIPPA (Health Information Privacy Protection Act).
Placing identifying information on a public server such as google's is a big no-no.
It is not obvious from your post whether things like names will be needed. If you can work with program assigned client numbers you might be able to protect yourself that way.
Note that even 'password protected' data on a public web server is not considered safe.
Some homework in this area is definately in order, since the ramifications can be HUGE.
They need to compile weekly meal counts on children served from each center by date, children served and each meal.
Good point, but I didn't get the sense that this is more that getting numbers from each location, and not personal infomation of any kind...
Good point on HIPPA. I was too focus on the how and ignored the what.
Chris' comment about this not being too difficult if you can find a programmer to help out is essentially my first reaction to this request. In the long run it is probably the best solution since the data is not really stored anywhere public. If the form can be filled out on a SSL capable server that should protect everything that much more.
If you are hosting the account on a public server, such as at a hosting provider, the SSL protects the transmission from the point of origin to the server, but the server is still a public server. The hosting company employees have ready access to the data stored there. Do you have a confidentiality agreement with them?
The programming of this type of project is easy. I program in ColdFusion all day long and can have something like this working in no time. The legalities of storing identifying information are the hard part.
The laws regarding the protection of health information are even more stringent than the protection of credit card information ESPECIALLY when you are capturing and storing information on minors.
If you are going to do this on a public server, such as a common web host, my best advice is to store only an internal client number. Things like SSN are a no-no. Numbers that can be researched outside of your organization are a no-no.
This is another case where the hardest part of being a programmer has nothing to do with programming.
All very good points about the issues of using a public server. This is were finding an Application Service Provider may be useful if you are not hosting on your own servers. Find an ASP that is geared to this type of application and will be willing to sign the necessary paperwork to insure the confidentiality of your data.
As I tried to point out, I think what the user is asking for is like a simple tally sheet, not a user registration system. No personal information and no reason that I can see for even using SSL...
Perhaps they will come back and give us some feedback on what has been discussed?