Gambling Treatment National Information System

CLIC Database

CLIC collects both clinical data and data on community/public health activities. For clinical activities, a flexible and sophisticated session-episode model is followed.

CLIC is designed to be easy enough for clinical staff to enter their own data. At the same time, it provides sophisticated reporting and data management functionality for advanced administrative users.

CLIC was developed in MS Access 2002 (VBA) and deployed as a runtime version. There is a conventional Front End/Back End split which makes it easy to deploy new versions electronically. CLIC is used on both standalone and LAN computers. CLIC was developed for the Problem Gambling Committee by PSAL and was based on two earlier gambling databases.

National Data Collection Process

PSAL manages national data collection, analysis, and reporting for the face-to-face gambling treatment sector on behalf of the Ministry of Health.

All data collection is processed through the CLIC (Client Information Collection) Patient Management System.

Data is then stripped of confidential information and exported electronically from each CLIC system to PSAL.

All data received is combined into a single national dataset using Combine Harvester. Combine Harvester resolves duplicate key issues, and consolidates labels e.g. 'The Salvation Army' is combined with 'The Sallies' etc according to user-defined settings. Combine Harvester also applies the standard relationships all CLIC datasets share.

Combine Harvester processes all data using MS SQL, and then exports the results into MS Access. This makes it easy to attach the standard Front End of CLIC to the generated data. The same approach enables national services such as PGF and Oasis to look at all their data combined.

Combine Harvester was designed by PSAL in collaboration with two AUT computing students. The system was originally written in VB6 but PSAL ported it across into MS Access 2002 VBA for flexibility reasons.

Data Quality Processes

PSAL developed a series of automated data quality reports for the Ministry using the open source database MySQL, and the powerful Python scripting language. The program automatically generates spreadsheets for service providers and emails them individually.

Analysis and Reporting

Python and MySQL are used to generate analyses and reports for the Ministry of Health. PSAL has generated the results used in the national statistics reports since 1997. This was originally done using the SPSS statistical package but more recently open source replacements are being used.