I was recently given a project by the managing partner of the firm I work for to roll up financials for all our clients from our Practice Management System.

So a quick Access Page with linked tables pointing to the ODBC connector for each database with a export macro gave me the raw transaction data in MySQL tables. I needed the provider names, practice info, service facility lookups and insurance plan lookups, so I ended up exporting 9 tables.

I had always used perl with database modules to digest data like this, but I decided to see what I could do with just SQL statements. I had built many projects with MySQL before, but was always limited to INSERT’s and UPDATE’s. Man I gotta hand it to you DB programmers out there. There’s a whole world of tools I never new existed.

This is all typical stuff for a medical practice management consultant firm. The trick here is dealing with the volume of data stored in many databases without having someone sit down and go into each database.