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I was brought into Cedars-Sinai to do a database presentation and I ended up
working on the Skeletal Dysplasia System (SDR) part-time throughout the following year. They
had some bad experiences with Oracle Consulting, so I was brought in to help them out
with a few projects with the goal of improving the relationship between the two entities.
I believe I was pretty successful in that area since they asked to keep me on the chosen project, the SDR.
There was a legacy system to track patients with this particular disease, but the system was old and
extremely slow. It was originally written in DBase IV and it would take the main operator over 24
hours to run some simple reports. Furthermore, the interface was very hard to navigate
since it was all in character mode and only one person could use the application at a time.
My initial goal was to help them design a new Oracle database and help with the data migration.
I was able to do that quickly and that's when I was asked to stay on the project. My next goal
was to make the application web enabled using as much generated code from Oracle Designer as possible,
since that was one of the products my group was selling. I ended up writing about half of the PL/SQL
code by hand, and used Designer to generate the other half of the application. The reason was that
the operators had some very specific details that the auto-generating tool could not handle.
By the time I left, they had a fully functioning, web enabled application with integrated reports.
The system not only stored patient data, but it also was able to store X-Rays (BLOBs) along with the
patient records. The operators could use the system from anywhere inside the hospital and the
reports that used to take 24 hours to run now took a few seconds at most.
I didn't realize how important it was at the time, but I was later interviewed about this application for an
internal Oracle publication. Plus, our group ended up signing a significant contract with Cedars-Sinai
later on that year.
Looking back, I wish I could change how I wrote a lot of the application but I feel I
did I decent job considering my limited experience at the time and how new web enabled applications were then.
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