INW International Emergency Medical Card

Dataswiss Solutions AG
Taegerwilen, Switzerland

The INW International Emergency Medical Card is an international emergency web card for storing medical information. The application first went into production on July 2005 and currently holds the medical information of over 5,000 people. The user base is growing by approximately 1,800 per month.

Each user enters and maintains the information himself directly in the web application or uses the INW service. The user buys access to the service on a yearly basis and supplies his complete medical history. This medical history includes information about previous diagnosis and diseases, hospital stays and out patient services, family history and lab results. All that information is stored in an SQL Server database to be shared between the patient and his local responsible doctor or, in case of emergency, by a hospital.

The user carries the International Emergency Web card with him. In the event of an emergency, the card holds the login information so that the hospital can access the important information without losing any time on further investigations. Because of the INW card, the doctor can identify a patient's sensitivity to medicines, such as penicillin, or can view his latest x-rays or CAT scans. All of the information available through the INW application is exportable into PDF as well.

INW is available in multiple languages including German, French, English and Spanish.

Application size and scope

The INW application runs on one Microsoft SQL Server database with 34 tables. At present, the number of records is about 123,000, though this is growing by more than 2.000 records per day.

INW has 16 web pages for end user interaction and another five web pages for administration purposes.

The project

As the sole developer, it took me just 12 days to complete this project. The majority of my time was spent creating the administrative tools. I only spent two days developing the database and the application, one day for the language translation, and two days creating the PDF exports. All in all, INW was built very quickly and very inexpensively due to Iron Speed Designer.

Code extensions and customizations

We use an accounting application that required me to write interfaces integrating the tools. I did implement several code customizations that enable users to exchange information among other users, automatically create secure passwords, and provide login information for customers who changed this information.

We included Crystal Reports and are in the process of finishing the Infragistics Scheduler integration.

Page layout customizations

Basically the design themes stayed the same, though I created my own buttons for various situations. I also changed some of the .xls data export files.

Iron Speed Designer impact

Iron Speed Designer saved us approximately $40,000 USD for the first year, including application development and maintenance.

Next steps

INW will soon be sold The Netherlands, Poland, France, and the United States, as well. We are about to create several more Iron Speed Designer applications for internal use.

About the developer

Frank Mainzer is the Chief Technical Officer for Dataswiss Solutions AG in Taegerwilen, Switzerland. He began using Iron Speed Designer in 2005. Frank has provided multiple language translations to Iron Speed, Inc. which have been incorporated into the tool itself. Most recently he provided both the German and Spanish (ES) language translations.