At Precision Healthcare Solutions, we fully understand CCL are able to leverage the power of the language to create efficient reports and extracts that are easy to maintain and modify later by other programmers. We accomplish this by following a set of programming rules developed and established by our founder, John Simpson. These rules layout all CCL reports and extracts in a specific pattern that is easy to implement and repeatable in every script. Like a recipe for baking a cake, there is a proper way to write CCL reports.

When writing efficient CCL code, we follow these principle rules:

• Before writing a single line of code, understanding client requirements is the most important step to a successful CCL script. While discussing your requirements, we also leverage our experience in writing thousands of CCL scripts over 18+ years to offer advice on how to best present a report or extract. As a client, you know exactly what your business needs are and you need a company who understands how to translate that need into CCL code.
• The second step in writing a CCL report or extract requires research. This research involves reviewing client examples and screen shots as well as the Cerner front application and back-end database tables. When researching tables for a report, special attention is given to understanding which indexes should be used for a report.
• Once coding begins, we approach writing our CCL scripts believing that every single line of CCL code is a potential point of failure. For this reason, not only is our code tested every few minutes during development, we also take special care to ensure that all source code is necessary. To often we see programmers adding vast amounts of un-needed code. Extra code can confuse programmers who later modify a script and lead to slow reports and bugs.
• We also believe that the little touches make all the difference in the world. Reports should always look good and be easy to read. Generating reports should also be simple to do. Using standard Cerner tools such as prompt builder and layout builder, adding these little touches is easy to do and is never an after thought. We take special care to ensure that prompts are flexible enough to allow for advanced reporting functionality such as sort changes, output style variations (e.g. CSV File vs. Printed Report) and other enhanced functionality such as drill down tree view or JavaScript enabled prompts. Report output should be clean and easy to follow and where possible reading enhancements such as zebra stripes are used.
• Testing a CCL script is performed in multiple ways. First, CCL code is tested during development to ensure that sample data can be retrieved as expected and that the CCL code is free from syntax errors. Once initial coding is complete, our CCL scripts undergo a final test before initial release to our clients. This final test is done on the complete report/extract and output results are validated against the Cerner front-end to ensure accuracy. Once we are happy that the report does what we expect, we pass it on to you for final review. If any errors are found we fix the errors and go through the same testing steps again until you are happy the code is correct.

Faster, better and cheaper

It doesn't take long for our clients to realize that contracting with Precision Healthcare Solutions results in excellent CCL report delivery. Our CCL scripts are fine tuned code that are all based on many years of development experience. We specialize in performance tuning reports and the products we deliver prove it. Our techniques and experience also give our clients some incredible cost savings as well. Since our code is developed with a strict pattern, we have no bloated code and our scripts consistently run with fewer lines of code than our competitors. Fewer lines of code take less time to write and less time to test resulting in fast development turnaround.

Often when clients do a CCL script quote comparison, they ask why the development hours in our quote is so much lower than our competition. Where a competitor may quote 40-100 hours for a job, often we quote 10-15. Our quotes are lower for a number of reasons, but primarily our quotes are lower due to our experience writing CCL reports and extracts following our development techniques and standards. Our CCL development offerings are a fine tuned service that nobody else can deliver.

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