[Gambas-user] Quicky app

[Scott Castaline]

Erik Vega wrote:

> It's actually quite interesting with me. I'd love to hear more about this,
> then again I love anything that deals with software and programming. Love to
> hear more, even if it's irrelevant and a bit off-topic.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, you asked for it. You may want to grab a beer before continuing.

We live in the Atlanta area of Georgia of the US of A. My wife is what 
they call a Service Coordinator or in some cases a Case Manager in the 
areas Early Intervention Program known as Babies Can't Wait in the 
Health District we live in. Her function is as an advocate for 
developmentally delayed infants. She assists the family in getting 
needed services for the child, such as Physical Therapy, Speech Therapy, 
Occupational Therapy, just to list a couple of things that I know of. 
The state of Georgia has in the past 1 - 2 years has started to make 
changes to the program affecting various groups in the program as well 
as making cuts in funds.

Okay, (forgive me Lord for I will be sinning) here comes the part where 
I rant. An idea of what is going on can be explained in a TV ad that the 
Democratic challanger to the Governor used in his campaign. It showed an 
empty adaptive wheelchair sitting in a dark room. The message was that 
the Governor, had cut money to the disabled, so that he could give 
himself and other rich business people major tax breaks. Which had some 
truth to it, not all. What is happening is that these kids are being 
divided up and placed into different funded groups. You have some that 
don't meet criteria so are direct billed to the state, those are not a 
problem. Then the very few that are Medicaid, also no problem. The 
problem is with 3 groups that are called CMO's. Sonny says (the 
Governor) that things are working great. The CMO's are making a profit, 
the state is saving money. Well yeh, the CMO's are getting paid by the 
state, but either don't pay the providers or take a very long time to 
pay. There are some therapists that have just gotten paid recently for 
services provided almost a year ago, and then they've held back or 
denied payment on some services. My wife originally started back in 1998 
sub- contracting to the program through another company that handled the 
billing and other administrative functions. They had to go out of 
business leaving about 35 to 50 people to have to fend for themselves. 
My wife of course is one of them, and is now contracted directly to the 
county's program BCW. I'm handling the billing and application process 
for her. Now the clincher, the state has just published guidelines to 
individual counties as to how they can restructure themselves. It looks 
like my wife's position could disappear. A speech therapist or a 
Physical Therapist, or whatever would now be expected to do Service 
Coordination as well as what they are supposed to be doing. Problem is 
that a lot of the Therapist's have stopped being providers because they 
couldn't afford to wait so long to be paid and then get paid for only 
half of what they were supposed to get. That is why I just want to throw 
something quick together, but something that I could then either go in 
and put in the needed time and work to fix up or replace. Ok end of rant.

Basically I figured that based on the data my wife works with and that 
some of that data is reused in the billing side, I felt this called for 
using a DBMS of some sort. I am familiar with MySQL version 4.x and have 
started playing around with 5.0.1. I came up with 3 tables. The first 
table is similar to an address book, with client name, address, 
caregiver (usually parent or some guardian), a phone number(I'm thinking 
of 2 fields for a primary number and an alternate number might also use 
check boxes for home, cell, work, fax, not sure if I need that part), 
type of billing whether Medicaid, State Funded, Peach State Health Plan( 
1 of the 3 CMO's), and Amerigroup (2nd of the 3 CMO's). The 3rd CMO 
refuses to pay for service coordination or provide it themselves, so 
that one doesn't matter. The last field would be in most cases a 
Medicaid number or an assigned number by the CMO. I was planning on 
using an autogenerated numbering system for indexing.

One child table could be compared to an item table in an inventory 
control DB. The record would contain a medical code number referred as 
the ICD9 which is related to the diagnosis (ie: Cerebral Palsy). I would 
then have a 3rd field that contain the value from autogenerated field in 
the parent table for a particular client. The relation would be multiple 
records in the child table to one record in the parent table, through 
the clientID (autogenerated field in Parent Table, and 3rd field in 
child). I think the key for this child table could be the ICD9.

The other Child Table would be a more involved version as the first 
child. My wife has to have at least one face to face visit(contact) with 
the client and caregiver and at least 3 indirects(phone calls, or other 
means) that can be with client/caregiver or a therapist. This table 
would track by date, type of contact, if face to face one of two 
possible locations and notes about the contact. The notes are not fixed 
in length but are definitely not books not even chapters.

Data entry, would be centered around the parent, which only needs to be 
inputted once unless there are changes such as phone number change or 
moved to another address. The first child would be entered most likely 
at the same time as the client into the parent table, but a means to be 
able to put more that one record per client. The second child table 
would not necessarily be used at the time of initial entry of client 
into the Parent Table and the first Child Table. I would need to be able 
to pull up a record of an existing client and enter info pertaining to 
the 2nd child. So a query of the parent to find a particular client and 
then the option to add data to the 2nd child that is related to the 
query d client. The clientID field would again come into play for this 
child. The field can be manually filled in by user as I realize that 
this would involve logic that I'm not sure of to automate. It's 
something that I could do later.

Reporting would be done once a month where one would need some fields 
from the Parent and the second child. A separate report for each client 
sorted by client and then the child info (contacts need to be sorted by 
date and show dat of contact, type of contact, (see description above), 
location of contact (if face to face), and the notes. Right now she uses 
a spreadsheet template that puts the client info and her name/title and 
date (month/year) as a header. The rest of the page is divided into 4 
horizontal sections that repeat themselves broken up into the date, 
type, location, and notes. In some cases the notes for a particular 
contact will flow into multiple sections (1 to 3 sections in rows).

Another report would be one of the billings directly to BCW. I am 
currently using a spreadsheet template that has last name, first name, 
Medicaid #, or State Funds, or State Funds/CMO Name, or even the comment 
of evalution/Not eligible, the date of face to face and dates of the 
first 3 indirects, and a final field of bill amount for client. This 
also contains a header of the form name, wife's name/title, month/year 
and a vendor #. I have room for 18 rows for clients and leaving 4 rows 
open for stamping by county accounting along with page total. Each apge 
looks the same with the final page containing the subtotal of each page 
and the final total. I'm not sure of how to determine the bill amount. 
The clients that are straight State Funds are billed one amount the Not 
Eligible another amount, dependent upon time involved (hourly rate), and 
CMOs and Medicaid are $0.00 amount since we bill direct but have to 
report it on this bill. The other bills are handled separately and at 
this time I'm not planning to include this in the billing part yet. I 
have forms that have to be hand written and mailed in, but I need to be 
able to pull up the info for reference from all 3 tables. This I think 
could be handled on a multilevel query, by client list all diag codes, 
and contacts for month.

I guess that's about it for now, there is another report that my wife 
does that is similar to my state billing. I apologize for my extensive 
use of bandwidth, and hope that I didn't destroy too many peoples day or 
now night(late night for me). I can also attach the forms in OOo format 
on a future email if interested. I need time to convert some of them 
from M$Office to OOo. The billing I have in OOo already.

Any suggestions or help, I would be forever indebted and if you come 
through Lawrenceville, GA., there's a place that serves real cold 
Guiness Stout Draft nearby.

TIA