Testimonial: Apple Physical Therapy's experience using DBXL

JeffTangen — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:40:10 GMT

Apple Physical Therapy

We are a Physical Therapy company located in Western Washington. Our company consists of 23 clinics located from Olympia to Seattle that all have 348 kbps to 1.2 mbps connections to the internet. The Central Business and Billing office is located in Puyallup Washington and connects to the internet using a full T1 (1.5mbps). Our clinics all connect to the Central office using VPN technology.

One of our main goals as a company was to centralize all our Patient Information to a Microsoft SQL 2005 database. We began by creating an InfoPath form that would submit Patient billing data. We were able to achieve this goal by simply using the Microsoft Technology of SharePoint 2007 Form Library. During testing, the new form seemed like it would be a perfect fit to our scenario.

Soon after deploying this solution did we see huge problems. The first thing we noticed was how slow the forms performed over a VPN connection. Clinics submit most of the billing information, which meant that employee productivity slowed down dramatically. Our company creates ~120 Patient Information forms/day and each form is submitted at least 3-4 times a day. That works out to about 400 submits/day from the hours of 7am to 7pm. I did some testing and found that the form would take from 1 to 2 minutes to open because of the amount of secondary data that would be required to fill in drop-down lists. Submitting and closing would take up to 30 seconds because of the slow nature of InfoPath data connections.

I was getting a lot of complaints from end users, and rightly so. From my readings I knew that InfoPath could submit to a Web Service, but how could I integrate that with my solution? I did weeks of research and finally came across Qdabra. Other Web Service solutions required you to know how to write code and build things from the ground up, or they would charge you to write a custom Web Service for your application. Qdabra’s DBXL seemed to be designed specifically for our situation. It claimed to increase the performance and functionality of integrating InfoPath with SQL.

We are now set-up with using DBXL as the Web Service that controls the submitting of data from InfoPath to SQL. All the primary and secondary data sources are using DBXL web services. The forms now take ~10-15 seconds to open and just a few seconds to Submit and Close. The end users love the new forms and thought I increased the speed of their connection to the Central Business office. The amount of bandwidth that is being used over the VPN has dropped dramatically.

Another problem with submitting InfoPath directly to a SQL database is when your form submits to multiple related tables. Our form submits to three tables. Each form would submit to a single row of the first table (holding Therapist information), which would have a one-to-many relationship with a second table (holding Patient information), which in turn would have a one-to-many relationship with the third table (holding treatment information). A big problem with submitting was when an end user would delete a row in the second table while there was related information in the third table. InfoPath would give an error because of a Key Constraint. The form wasn’t “smart” enough to realize that if an end user was deleting the Patient Information that the underlying Treatment Information should also be deleted. The only way around this was to delete all the Treatment Information, submit the form, and then delete the patient. This would cause added frustration because of the slow nature in submitting.

DBXL solved the problem of deleting/submitting because it controls all aspects of table relations. DBXL knows how the deleting a parent table row should affect the child rows. Now end users can delete patient information and DBXL will handle the child tables as it should.

A third thing I would like to mention is the support that was given to me during the first couple weeks of deployment. We had an issue with old form submissions conflicting with new form data. The guys and DBXL worked very hard to help me figure out the problem. They seemed to have worked around the clock and we finally found the issues with my old form. They are a great group of people to work with.

Jeff Tangen
Network Administrator
Apple Physical Therapy

Qdabra Database Accelerator

Testimonial: Apple Physical Therapy's experience using DBXL