By sphopkins on

I like the core of Drupal, and I believe that it is an excellent interface for what I need to do. Background is that I work in a healthcare environment, and I am helping develop a database of clinical information that is derived from actual patient data. Data will be available in the following ways:

  • XML (XML files generated by another application and then inserted into SQL database via a transform)
  • via PERL scripts extracting data from HTML
  • SQL queries of databases
  • Human input (manually entering above data when electronic forms unavailable or manually uploading images)

    Is developing a custom Drupal module the way to go ? From what I can see it would be excellent to do this within Drupal as it has taxonomies, versioning, user modules, authentication and tracking, etc. Not a simple task I admit but is there a better way to do this within Drupal ?

    • Comments

    dageshi’s picture

    dageshi commented

    I would strongly suggest to see how much you can do with CCK and custom node types before you go the custom module route. Even if everything you need to store can't be stored by CCK, it can be extended with custom field types.

    sphopkins’s picture

    sphopkins commented

    Thanks. I have been looking at using CCK as well, but I was thinking that the mix of media (or nodes) and such might not be the best way to use CCK. I think that CCK can do most of what we need, but I have to dig deeper. The only part I need to wrap my head around is how you would associate custom nodes to a common "index" - the patient.

    muhleder’s picture

    muhleder commented

    You could use a nodereference cck field to associate a cck data node with a cck patient node.

    You would probably need a custom module to bring your data into drupal, but in terms of organising and displaying that data, cck and views will probably do all that you need.

    sphopkins’s picture

    sphopkins commented

    Thanks. That is an excellent idea. The "bringing the data in" will either have to be a custom node or it will be something else. Currently there is a lot of data generated by a data mining application that will be fields in the database, and lots of other technology to get the discrete data we need.

    mtsanford’s picture

    mtsanford commented

    One key question you have to ask is: Is the only user front end going to be Drupal?

    If you need to access this database from other applications I would not take the advise to use CCK, but instead design the best database you can for the needs your organization has. For the Drupal front end you could have a patient CCK content type, but have a custom module that loads/saves in the clinical information from your database to exist alongside your Drupal patient content type. (using hook_nodeapi)

    sphopkins’s picture

    sphopkins commented

    This is the only user front end for the database. We have other clinical databases that we will extract information from, as well as some knowledge automation technologies that we are using to extract information from narrative documents (dictations, pathology, etc).

    If someone else wants to get the info from our database (that I know they do not have right now!) they will have to work for it...