Trauma Studies

The Problem:
The American Association for the Surgery of Trauma is committed to research and education with the goal of improving care for trauma patients. With partners everywhere in the world, they have been collecting and analyzing information for years. With growth of partners, research personnel realized many flaws in collecting data on paper: the lack of standardization among partners of AAST, the inability to share information with partners and the amount of paper information to maintain and analyze. AAST approached Infotech to help them find a solution to these problems.

The Solution:

Infotech moved AAST partners away from paper and to a website that can be accessed any time of the day, anywhere in the world. This immediately eliminated the need to keep the paper forms and allowed users to search, sort and filter information any way they needed. Standards for answer validation were put in place to ensure no confusion or errors were possible. The technology made it easy for physicians to submit study cases and view immediate results in the form of reports.

Sustainability:

After working with AAST on several studies, it became apparent that while each study was unique, they all kept the same structure. The number of questions may vary, the reports may be adjusted, yet the format is always the same. Most of the time spent on the development of each Trauma study was the repetitive programming to handle the input for each question. Infotech saw the potential to create solutions quickly and efficiently with minimum programming error. Infotech went further and created a template-driven technology that generates Trauma studies, providing developers with ready to use code. With as little effort as entering question text, type of question and allowed responses for each question, this template for Trauma study only requires one fifth the amount of programming time developers normally would have spent, saving Infotech time and saving the client money. The Trauma study template was a unique way to implement a solution for AAST that resulted in a long, sustainable relationship between AAST and Infotech and allowed AAST to conduct more cost efficient research.