How AllCode Helped ICANotes Using AWS QuickSight
About ICANotes
ICANotes was founded back in 1999 by Ira R. Morgenstern and Don Morgenstern. The concept for the company largely stemmed from Ira’s desire for a simpler system of logging patient notes. Though what would become ICANotes started as a basic hobby software for his own professional use, Don and other partners helped to expand the vision into a much more distributed system. While the ICANotes business model does heavily emphasize behavioral health, they currently work with a number of disciplines.
The Problem
ICANotes did have a working solution, but they wanted to begin implementing a cloud-based solution to take greater advantage of the benefits of the cloud, including better scaling and greater up-time.
AllCode’s Solution
Our solution to this problem largely involved the use of AWS QuickSight. In the past, clients have approached us with the idea of using AWS QuickSight as a BI tool, in some embedded capacity, or as anomaly detection. For a job of this type and scale, we will first do a deep analysis of what the customer wants addressed, what sort of alternatives the customer had considered or used previously, and the potential benefits of enacting a change to QuickSight. During the planning phase, it is important for both the client and us to fully understand how data is being taken in, processed, and kept up-to-date. Before building anything, we will provide demonstrations of the features we intend to implement.
Implementation of Quicksight
ICANotes first connected a read-only copy of their production database to QuickSight that would still receive daily updates. QuickSight is designed to be easy to use, so we used the click-and-drag system to compile an interactive dashboard with reports and informative visual elements. These reports are data driven and can be shared with other members of the company. The dashboards make heavy use of tables with multiple variables, primarily ranks, conditional and accumulative operations, and dates. Multiple tabs further categorize based on date ranges and prescriptions.
Security Compliance
For security reasons, these features are limited to those who have been invited to the QuickSight workspace. Out of the entire company, a select handful of ICANotes employees have access to the dashboard. Fewer have access to the write permissions. Users will need to provide their AWS credentials before having access to the company account and by extension QuickSight.
Data Intake
The database is a read-only copy of the production database, but is updated every night. Multiple datasets were created from the original using SQL queries over the database, each with pre-established nightly update schedules. The process makes use of raw SQL queries with multiple joins and unions to get the most use out of it when it undergoes QuickSight analysis.
Conclusion
AWS QuickSight is an essential service when the users need to process copious amounts of customer data being taken in. It can conduct analytical queries and feed the data into user-made dashboards that best suit the end user’s needs. AllCode’s team of AWS professionals has ample experience working with different models and industries.