Access or Excel?

[hektisk]

Hello:



I work for a mid-sized healthcare company which runs a variety of senior care companies, including nursing homes, a home health agency, a hospice, etc. We would like to expand our data tracking and reporting capabilities for reasons of both internal quality control and external marketing. While I have begun this in Excel, I would like help in determining whether or not this project would best be done in Access.

By way of experience and background, I myself am an intermediate user of Excel and a beginner user of Access. My only exposure to Access was during a 3-hour hands-on course I took yesterday. I am very comfortable with computers in general and I pick things up quickly. The end-user who will be entering data into these workbooks/databases will mostly likely be a beginner user of Excel and will have no experience with Access.

In regards to the data I'm looking to store as well as the queries and reports I'd like to generate from the data, let me give you an example of the worksheet I've created in Excel for one of our nursing homes:

There are two worksheets. One contains the client's static information for a given admission date, and would be filled out soon after admission. This data includes:
Medical record #, name, admission date, insurance, DOB, primary diagnois, referral source (hospital), screening source, primary care physician, # and type of wounds admitted with.

The second worksheet would be updated upon two events: the start of a new asessment period for the client (short-term stays are divided into Medicare-defined 'assessment periods'), and upon discharge. Information recorded in this sheet includes:
Reimbursement rate during a specific assessment period, date of discharge, # and type of wounds healed or acquired during stay

I would like to use this data to answer queries and to generate reports. Examples of queries include:
-How many clients with diabetes were referred to us by a given hospital between January and March of this year?
-How many/what % of clients came to us from a particular area?
-How many pressure ulcers did we heal in December 2010?
-What is the difference between inaverage reimbursement rate during a client's second assessment period and their first?

Examples of reports include:
-A monthly report for a particular hospital, which would include the following information: # of patients referred by hospital during that month, their clinical outcomes (number of wounds healed, etc), etc.
-A diagnosis-specific report which would show clinical outcomes, where clients with that diagosis were referred, etc.

Thanks to some fancy code supplied by various friends and message board colleagues, I'm able to answer those queries and generate those reports (though I have not created them yet) using Excel. However, I am starting to wonder if Access is best equipped due to the relational status of some of these questions.

I guess my main question is this: Am I best off continuing to do this project in Excel, given the fact that I 1) am familiar with the program, and 2) can conceivably do what my current desired ends are using it, or are the realtionships sufficiency complex enough to warrant me jumping head-on into Access?

Thank you in advance for any guidance and assistance.

Adam