Category Archives: better-than-what-money-can-buy

OIO moves forward with 0.9.5 release

OIO, the open source metadata creation and interchange system, adds data cleaning, drill-down analysis, and other minor feature upgrades in this scheduled (monthly) release. 0.9.5 works with the newest Zope-2.2.4 and is compatible with all metadata and data from previous versions of the OIO.

Release Name: 0.9.5
This is a minor upgrade release. The really *exciting* enhancements
did not make it into this release. I had to spend most of the month
working on a grant submission to get some help for developing and
disseminating the OIO in the next three years. Keep those bug reports
and feature requests coming! I can also use some help writing a
tutorial. Please let me know if you can help.



New Features:

  1. Online help for Reports (including data merging and mining)
  2. Printable forms display
  3. Data cleaning tool: Add patients to patient list by criteria=missing data
  4. Automatic assignment of item number when an item is added without
    an item number to a form (max + 10)

  5. Checking for duplicate item and itemtype name during form creation
    to prevent duplication of item or itemtype names

  6. Drill-down display of number of patients vs. number of data instances
  7. Tests O.K. on Zope 2.2.4

Bugs fixed:

  1. Regular expression template does not work in Netscape browser – resolved
  2. Change Report does not work from Selected Reports

—-
The OIO download is only 350k and is available at:
Open-Outcomes.sourceforge.net

Alternatively, you can get a free public access account from
www.TxOutcome.Org
to try it first.

Please contact me at andrew_p_ho@eudoramail.com if you have any
questions/problems or would like to be a developer on this project.

OIO (0.9.4) Delivers Visual Analog Scale and Data Mining

Need more than radio buttons, click boxes, and drop-down menus for your web-based medical system? The latest release of Open Infrastructure for Outcomes (OIO), (Free account/demo here) shows what is possible by using a tiny Java Applet to implement a visual analog scale (5k). Users of the OIO can now incorporate visual analog scales into their web-forms with a few clicks– all without writing a single line of Java. Want to do data mining? Just point and click.

Following the introduction of XML metadata import and export in 0.9.3, oio-0.9.4 is the newest feature-enhancement release. It now allows the incorporation of Java Applets into web-forms for data input without programming. The new Visual Analog Scale form element is based on this capability.

The second major enhancement is client-side validation through Regular Expression (template). Now, the entire process of using Javascript to validate user input is automated.

The third major added feature is data merging and drill-down querying across Forms (and versions). This is the beginnings of adding data mining and statistical tools to future releases of the OIO.

New Features:

  • Applet integration: Visual Analog scale
  • Regular expression template,
  • Online help for Forms and Patients screens
  • Data merging across forms (and versions)
  • Drill-down data mining
  • Integrated examples during itemtype definition

    The OIO is built with and uses the open-source Zope application server and Postgresql. The OIO download is only 350k and is available from:
    Open-Outcomes.sourceforge.net


    Alternatively, you can get a free public access account from
    www.TxOutcome.Org
    to try it first.

    We invite other open and closed source projects to incorporate OIO code and technology.
    By using the OIO and working together, hopefully we can accelerate the evolution towards more flexible and inter-operable systems.

  • Latest OIO Enables Medical Forms Over the Web

    OIO answers the question: Why get stuck with a system that will not grow with your practice or project? With the latest release of the Open Infrastructure for Outcomes (0.9.3), forms created with OIO and hosted on any OIO server can be downloaded as XML files. This opens the door to the creation of
    “forms” libraries, where forms can be cataloged, peer-reviewed, indexed, searched, and easily shared on the web. The first public “forms” library is now online at OIO’s main site, www.TxOutcome.Org

    What is the OIO Library?

    The OIO Library is more than a file download and management server.
    It is an integral component of the Open Infrastructure for Outcomes (OIO) that
    enables collaborative development and distribution of next generation
    data management tools. The OIO Library manages the “forms”, and
    the OIO Server uses the “forms” to manage data (collected from patients,
    customers, etc). In flexible and scalable configurations, organizations
    and individuals can implement OIO systems to serve their
    particular data management needs. Ultimately, an useful library
    of forms and other data reporting/analysis tools will be
    available to further reduce the cost of developing and maintaining
    web-based software.

    Features

    Completed

  • Forms Upload and Download allowing re-use and sharing of web-forms
  • Online preview of forms in the collection
  • Drill-down display of items and itemtypes attributes
  • Folder and form browser for finding forms by proximity
  • Extensible tree structure for forms classification by function and domain
  • Annotated Folders can be added to further classify and organize forms
  • Download counter for each form
  • Anonymous access
  • Role-based access to content management options (delete forms/folders/etc)

    Pending

  • Item-level comparision of forms
  • Forms indexing and searching by keywords, sub-elements
    (i.e. item names, question prompts, itemtypes).

  • Online references pertaining to forms in the collection
  • Links from each form to the form author/contributor’s
    project or documentation page

  • Annotation of each form with Users’ comments and reviews
  • Transparent linking to other forms servers




    You can run your own OIO server (version 0.9.3)
    or register for a public access account at www.TxOutcome.Org.
    OIO file download, mailing list, and development are hosted by sourceforge.net with the OIO project here on sourceforge.