Beginner Help

[Chris Suyeda]

First and foremost, I just want to say what an awesome and helpful community you have going here and want to apologize if this is the wrong section to go about posting my questions, but seeing as how I am relatively new to the program... I'm not sure what other subforum it would be belong in.

I was recently hired as a Junior Specialist involved with research. Recently, my boss has asked me to learn FileMaker 11 Advanced to create a database (with a questionnaire implemented into it) for all our patients information. We are trying to move from away from "paper" records and questionnaires and towards digital. So here I am trying to create what she is looking for in a weeks time. I've read through several tutorials, watched a few videos, and searched online for what I am trying to accomplish, but have yet to succeed. Luckily, I am very familiar with online communities and happened to come across this one.

Anyways, on to my questions:

I have created a database with several tabs (Patient Information, Baseline Visit, 6 Month Follow Up, 1 Year Follow Up, etc).

The Patient Information tab is going to have general information about the patient including name, date of birth, etc etc.

The Baseline Visit tab will have a questionnaire that we will ask the patients a series of questions. For their 6th Month Follow Up, I am going to ask them the SAME series of questions as I did during their Baseline Visit. Do I have to create a new field/radio button for the same question (for each follow up)? I noticed I am not able to have the same field twice (or more) and for obvious reasons. I was wondering if there an easier way to go about doing this.

Also, at the end of the day, we want to be able to compare and contrast the results of the questionnaire. Seeing as how the questionnaire is around 75 questions, is there a better way to present the information without having 75 different fields? It will be hard to compare and contrast the results when scrolling side-to-side -- over and over again.

Any insight on these topics would be much appreciated. If I was unclear with anything I said above, I apologize and I thank you for taking the time to read through this and answer. I will try to clarify the best I can.

Take care FMForums! Hope to hear from you soon!

[comment]

Seeing as how the questionnaire is around 75 questions, is there a better way to present the information without having 75 different fields?

You should have a separate table for Questions (75 records), and another table for Answers (each answer being an individual record - so with say 10 patients x 2 visits each, you will have 1,500 records in this table). Each answer should be related to a question and to a patient. This will allow you to pick any combination of answers you want - and, no less important, in any order you want.

So here I am trying to create what she is looking for in a weeks time.

This is by no means a simple task, and your expectation may be overly optimistic. See also:

http://fmforums.com/forum/topic/57970-does-anyone-takes-us-seriously/

Edited July 15, 2011 by comment

[Chris Suyeda]

Thanks for the quick reply! I was wondering if you can point in the direction of a tutorial on how to go about relating the questions and answers to a patient (more or less). I'll go ahead and start searching the forums as well. If there is no tutorial/someone else who has asked, is this a complicated method? Or can it be learned through experimentation?

[comment]

Try searching the forums for "survey".