PRESS
RELEASE
Dr. Paul Dorsey, President,
Dulcian, Inc. Wins The Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer Challenge with Software
that Helps Save the Lives of Women and Children
Dulcian's Survey Generator entry
was selected as the Grand Prize Winner in Oracle Corporation's
"Fusion Middleware Developer Challenge." The goal of the Oracle-sponsored contest was
to honor the most innovative use of Oracle Fusion Middleware technology.
Dulcian's Survey Generator was
designed to support a complex, web-based medical questionnaire that could not
be supported by any commercially available tool. The Survey Generator was built
for The Preeclampsia Foundation.
Preeclampsia is a very common disease of pregnancy characterized by high
blood pressure and protein in the urine.
Dr. Paul Dorsey, Dulcian's founder and president as well as an Oracle
Fusion Middleware Regional Director, lost his first child to this disease in
2002 and had his company build the Survey Generator to help The Preeclampsia
Foundation collect data that may be used to prevent other tragic outcomes of
the disease.
Dr. Dorsey said: "When my wife
and I first lost our son, we were astounded at how little research had been
done on preeclampsia. We couldn't even
find out how likely it was for us to be able to go through another pregnancy
successfully." Dr. Dorsey owns a
computer consulting firm so he decided to try to do something to help the
preeclampsia research effort. Funding
the entire development effort himself, he embarked on a two-year project to
build the most sophisticated survey generator in the world.
The survey for the Preeclampsia
Foundation was released in November 2006. Dr. Thomas Easterling, the head of
The Preeclampsia Foundation's medical board and designer of the survey
indicated that "In only two weeks, over 700 people filled out the survey
providing a gold mine of information for researchers. According to Leslie
Weeks, President of The Preeclampsia Foundation, "The survey generator is
a wonderful tool. It will definitely contribute to the Foundation's research
efforts. We plan to make survey results
available to researchers dedicated to finding a cure for preeclampsia. We are very proud of Oracle's recognition of
Dr. Dorsey's efforts and thankful for his contributions to the
Foundation."
How the Survey
Generator works:
The goal was to minimize the maintenance demands of the survey which would have been difficult for non-IT professionals and ultimately too inflexible and cost prohibitive.
It was decided to use a repository-based approach where the entire specification of the survey would be contained in a set of database tables and the entire survey generated from the repository. This approach allowed non-IT professionals to easily build complex surveys.
The surveys are entered into the system using the Survey Designer, an ADF Struts application completely generated from the Dulcian BRIM® environment. The surveys consist of generated web applications and their associated database objects and are stored in a small Oracle repository. Currently the application is an ADF/JSP Struts application; but it is now being rewritten using Java Server Faces technology.
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