NACHC revamps Conference Attendance Tracking solution
Business Situation
Established in 1971, the National
Association of Community Health
Centers (NACHC) is a nonprofit
organization that works with community
health centers. Its member
health centers, which serve 18 million
people at more than 7,000 sites
located throughout the United States,
provide uninsured individuals and
families with access to basic health
care. These organizations depend
in large part on public financial
help to serve their constituencies.
NACHC typically holds four conferences
a year for its member organizations.
These conferences are
attended by CEOs, board members,
medical professionals, social workers,
other health care workers, and
accountants who work with these
organizations. Conference attendees
receive continuing education credits
for attending these events; therefore,
it’s important to have a reliable
way of tracking their attendance.
Previously, NACHC outsourced the
tracking of conference attendance. “That approach was brutally expensive,”
according to Jason Gump,
NACHC’s Director of IT. “It cost
around $12,000 per conference.”
Business Solution
Looking for an easy way to use its
own staff to track conference attendance,
NACHC looked into purchasing
bar code scanners. After researching
various options, the organization
ended up going with Microvision’s
products. “We needed quite a few
scanners, because our conferences
typically have 10-15 concurrent sessions,
explains Gump. “Since we’re
a nonprofit, price is a major consideration
for us, and a lot of scanners
out there cost around $1,500
to $2,000 apiece—but Microvision’s
ROV Scanners with USB Cable cost
under $200. They also provide plenty
of on-board storage, and they’re
convenient to use, because they don’t
have to be tethered to a computer.”
NACHC originally started with an earlier Microvision product, the Flic Scanner, but found its ability to store a maximum of 500 scans to be a bit limiting. Recently, the organization upgraded to the new ROV Scanners, which have eight times
more on-board storage. “With the
ROV Scanners’ ability to store up to
4,000 barcodes, we now have more
than enough on-board storage to
meet our needs,” says Gump.
At each session of an NACHC conference, a ROV Scanner-equipped staff member stands at the door and scans barcodes located on attendees’ badges as they enter the room. At the end of the day, staff members simply plug the ROV Scanners into a USB port on one of the organization’s Windows-based PCs, and the Scanner Wedge software automatically uploads the scanned data to an Excel spreadsheet.
At the conclusion of the conference, NACHC uses an ODBC driver to upload the spreadsheet data to its ASI iMIS database. “The database uses the attendee number as a unique identifier of each attendee, and with each conference session also having a unique number, we can easily generate a report showing who attended which sessions,” says Gump. “Then we upload the reports to a website where attendees can check on their status.”
Benefits
- Affordable Price: “At less than $200 apiece, the ROV scanners are very affordable—and for a nonprofit organization like ours, that’s critical¯,” says Gump.
- Accuracy: “We’ve found the ROV Scanners to be extremely accurate,” says Gump. “They’re dead on, every time.”
- Ease of use: “We typically hire retirees to do our scanning, and we didn’t want to invest in a lot of training,” says Gump. “But the ROV Scanners are so easy to use that no training at all is required. We just tell them, ‘Press the button, and if you hear a beep, it worked. If you don’t, scan the badge again.’ But it almost always works on the first try.”
- Seamless integreation with Excel: Uploading the scanned data to the Excel spreadsheet is also really easy, according to Gump. “Other than installing the driver, the only setup step we had to do was to input a delay into the upload process, so that each attendee will be entered on a new line,” he says. “Now our staff members just plug the scanner in, and the rest is automatic. We didn’t have to do any training.”
- Small, compact size: “The ROV scanners weigh very little, and they’re about the size of a TV remote,” says Gump. “That makes them very convenient to work with.”
- Rugged Construction: “We ship the scanners all over the country; we accidentally drop them on occasion; and they’ve always held up just fine,” says Gump. “They can definitely take a beating.”
learn more
- Download this barcode scanner case study in PDF format
- Learn more about the ROV Scanner