:: KIDS – Kids Integrated Data Systems ::

The large caseloads and inherently difficult behavioral problems that social service agencies are asked to juggle have been the source for recent national headline news. In an effort to ensure that accurate information is available on all children in care, a non-profit organization called KIDS Data Systems (with ongoing support from the Duke Endowment) began funding development for software that enables children's residential-treatment facilities to track details about their population. GeoSolve took over development responsibilities for this product in 1999 and has completed three major version releases since that time. It is currently being used at approximately 100 sites throughout North America. A detailed description of this product's capabilities can be found at the KIDS clients web site.

A sampling of the unique challenges our company resolved for KIDS are outlined below:

Product Maintenance:

• A thorough review and consolidation of database objects to improve maintainability and performance of the application: The product we
  inherited had evolved over a number of years to include a great number of objects and programming code that was no longer used. One of
  the first things we did was a comprehensive "house-cleaning", documentation and consolidation of objects. Following our work, we were
  able to remove approximately 80 two-field lookup tables and their corresponding data entry forms by consolidating all of this into two tables
  and one form. This consolidation improved the performance, stability and maintainability of the application.


• The original product had over 300 reports, which could only be retrieved by navigating to successive switchboard forms sprinkled throughout
  all parts of the application. We used our proprietary "Output Manager" report manager to consolidate all reports into a centrally located form.
  In addition to managing report filters and parameters, the output manager allows exporting any report into a variety of different formats
  (such as Excel, Word, Text, Email Attachments, etc.) A display of this form is immediately below:Comprehensive reorganization of all data
   entry forms into "tabbed" display forms to allow users to more easily navigate to the information of interest.


Major new functionality added to the Clients application including:

• Plan of care system,


• Academic record maintenance,


• Work attendance,


• A merge replication mechanism allowing central offices to report and view all data from multiple satellite offices

GeoSolve Consulting inherited an application that stretched the capabilities of Microsoft Access and of a human's ability to use a software program. We refined the product into a user-friendly, performance optimized and stable product.