High School Student Volunteers Perl Expertise to Save Hospital
December 05, 1998Nebraska High School Student
Volunteers His Perl Expertise to Save Hospital
As a longtime user and admirer of O'Reilly books and an enthusiastic Perl programmer, I read www.Perl.com regularly. I recently had a small part in a Perl success story that I would like to share with the Perl community. In a quick summary, a high school student with Perl programming skills solved a text-processing problem for a local hospital that saved them hours of work, and with no cost since it was a volunteer project. -- Steven R. Dunbar, J. D. Edwards Honors Program, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Andy Rutledge is a senior at Lincoln East High School in Lincoln, Nebraska. Andy completed his volunteer hours for the Lincoln Public Schools Citizenship Issues Class at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in the Management Information Systems area in Autumn 1998.
Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital needed an easier way for employees to access the electronic policies and procedures files. The solution was to design a Web page that allowed employees to search by topic. In order to build this solution, the hospital needed someone with the programming skills to take the original documents in a word-processor format and convert them to separate documents for the Web.
Andy, who already had all the necessary Perl programming skills, volunteered for the project. Charlene Dunbar, Medical Records Administrator, co-directed Andy ’s work on this project. Andy applied his Perl programming skills and within a few dedicated hours wrote a Perl program for the task. The program converted 11 large text files with 2,000 individual sections into 2,000 HTML files with consistent naming and automatic creation of a table of contents. He used Perl regular expressions and accomplished the task of dividing the files, naming them consistently, and generating a table of contents with just 200 lines of code. This program was compact and efficient and ran smoothly.
Since the programming went so fast and worked so well, Andy had volunteer hours left over. Andy helped design the search page and the underlying indexing of the files which then provided a "user friendly" interface to the thousands of procedures at Madonna.
