Purdue University Health Center (PUSH)

Systems Analysis, UNIX shell scripting, database/SQL reporting, Novell, proprietary systems.

I worked two years for PUSH and helped upgrade from an inflexible and dated IBM System 36 mini computer (with dumb terminals and a few standalone PCs) to a networked, client-server environment with a RISC-6000, a Novell Server, and Windows clients. We also helped the Health Center get connected to the campus backbone and for the first time have access to the Internet. Of course big concerns in all of this were security and privacy of student medical records. One of our biggest focuses was the procurement of a new medical billing system that could track patients from check-in through various locations in the health center. We did the analysis to customize this procured system to the Health Center's needs as well as to interface it with the University Registrar and Purdue Accounting mainframe systems. In the end, the new Medical Billing and Tracking System more than paid for itself by providing better patient billing and collection.

The Health Center went live with the new system in August of 1995. Since we were a "two-man" shop, my colleague Karen and I went to a swing shift so that the two of us could cover the Health Center 7 days a week from 7a to 11p during the first few months of the switchover. While the regular doctors and clinics were only open on weekdays, Urgent Care with its supporting X-ray and Lab facilities were open 7 days a week.

In addition to the proprietary reporting features of the procured system, I also used SQL to extract and format data for conversion and to feed medical statistics to reports such as the one shown below.