VISUAL BASIC

Week 5: Visual Basic

Visual Basic

Introduction

An efficient and cost effective computerized gym records system was developed to provide centralized and decentralized reports of education participation. Collaboration with a computer analyst and programmer was essential to integrate our education information database with the gym's mainframe system.

The proliferation of rapidly changing health care systems, technologies, and clinical programs requires health care employers to provide increased education and training for developing the competency of multi-skilled professionals. Documentation of health related activities in a meaningful, accessible format is a challenge for the managers. We developed a computer-based gym record system to solve this problem.

Visual basic is a tool that allows you to develop windows(Graphical user interface- GUI) applications. The applicationshave familiar appearance to the user.

Visual basic is event driven; meaning code remains idle untilcalled upon to respond to some event (button pressing, menuselection.. etc). An event processor governs visual basic. Nothing happens until an event is detected. Once an event isdetected, the code corresponding to that event (event procedure)is executed. Program control is returned the event processor.

Designing a user interface is more an art than a science. There are guidelines that can be used but the end result of the design of the interface depends on many unrelated issues. Issues such as system requirements, user preferences, the rate of data input interfaces exist, whether or not must be intuitive, aesthetic requirements and other system speed.

Plan

It was readily apparent that only with the support of computer technology could these essential outcome criteria be met with any efficiency. After conferring with programming specialists in our gym's information systems department and determining that the project was feasible, we transferred our criteria to a project plan, which consisted of a chronological list of tasks:

1. Identify the elements of the gym's information system database.

2. Collaborate with specialists to identify appropriate hardware and software, and to determine a time schedule for design and implementation.

3. Prepare a pro forma budget for the project.

4. Design a process for evaluation during and after implementation.

5. Education Information System Database.

Test

The essential elements of the record system were determined to be identification of the customers. Because more than one customer may carry the same name, the addition of an identifying number would be essential. Any method of identifying the customer's unit would need to incorporate a means of tracking employee transfers from one station to another, as well as changes in employment status. Since key elements of the employees record, such as licensure and level of education, already were captured in the personnel department information system, we saw no need to replicate these data in the education information system.

System's Output

Detailed and summary data are produced in report format. Five separate reports are produced. The generic heading on each includes the date and time the report was generated, demographic data (i.e., cost center and employee number and name), and the report title. There are two types of reports: one for individual employee information and a series of four administrative ...