The Proposition

In proposing our project, our team made sure we could not only improve, but solve Sightlife’s major data issues. We wanted to provide SightLife with a solution to help them streamline data entry, reduce errors, and understand their data more dynamically.

Our team's ability to provide SightLife with a data management system was constrained by SightLife's need for something simple, inexpensive, and easy to maintain without the hiring of a database administrator. SightLife needed to make sure that our tools would be user-friendly, so that those with varying skill levels could easily use our solution. Also, as a non-profit organization they are limited in the resources they can invest in building and maintaining our new system.

For our project, we designed a data management system, in the form of an easily maintainable and user-friendly Access Database joint with powerful Power BI visualizations. We chose to use Microsoft Access because SightLife already had the software included in their Microsoft subscription. We wanted to utilize a platform that would not introduce an added cost for SightLife's Clinical Team to use or maintain (unlike other popular database management platforms, which require separate subscriptions). Similarly, SightLife already had access to the Power BI reader, and could afford the low monthly subscription fees for the editor. We had originally planned to utilize Tableau as our project's visualization software, but realized that having Tableau's subscription was costly and not as feasible for SightLife to acquire. Our team realized that Power BI was just, if not more, useful and effective for powerfully communicating knowledge and trends from SightLife's data in the Access database.

Success Criteria

The project will have achieved its goals when the following are completed:

  • Create a standardized data collection, data insertion and formatting process (e.g. fields, data types, etc.)
  • Generation of data visualizations is streamlined and improved interpretability
  • Human error and data handling time is minimized

Our plan for completing each of these success criteria was as follows:

  • Design and build a well-organized/normalized database in Access
  • Build forms in Access that can be easily used to accurately and efficiently insert data into the database, maintaining the integrity of SightLife's data
  • Build queries in Access, that can be connected to visualizations in Power BI
  • Build visualizations and dashboards in Power BI that not only answer SightLife's various questions about their data, but also provide deeper insight