Document Management Solution

[mjblay]

Hi, I have some familiarity with Access, Word, and Mail-merge, but I am trying to create a much deeper document management solution for my medical practice. I've sunk quite a few hours into researching this already, and I'm not sure if it's possible. I'd appreciate your opinions.



I envision the following:
1. A table of referrers that contains their names, adresses, contact info, etc.
2. A table of patients that contains their names, dates of birth, etc.
3. A table of letters addressed to one particular referrer (linked to the referrers table) and regarding a patient (linked to the patients table) that stores the text of letters I'm sending.

Ideally, I would like to compose the text of the letter using Word because of its spell-check and dictionary capabilities. I am only storing text data in the letters, so I'd like to compose in a Word object in an Access form (if that's possible), then dump that text data into the letters table (not store it as an OLE object).

When it came time to print and send a letter, I'd like to populate a new Word document template using the information stored in the database. I don't mind saving the document independently as well, but I'd like to have the document's text in the database so I can easily search by referrer and patient to find which letters I've written about the patient in the past.

Is this a reasonable project to undertake? Is it a decent model, or should I think of storing and composing the data differently?

I appreciate any advice you could give!

[apr pillai]

I think you are in the right direction. If you compose text in Memo Field of Access you can do spell check in there too.

ActiveX Control of Word or Excel also can be embedded in an Access Form.

Select Object... from Insert Menu.

A list of Objects will be displayed, Word, Excel, Chart Object etc. are available in there. You may select the required object and draw it in a rectangular shape on the Form in Design View.