Innovative Success Story: Association of Regulatory Boards of Optometry

Innovative Systems Brings Optometry Association’s
Members Into Focus

The Association of Regulatory Boards of Optometry (ARBO) is the federation of state, provincial, and territorial boards of optometry throughout North America. Formally organized in 1919 as the International Board of Boards, ARBO’s main directive is to provide resources and assistance to its member optometry boards.

As ARBO has grown, so has its purpose. The association not only evaluates the uniformity and quality of practicing optometrists’ continuing education through its COPE program, it also recently instituted a council to manage the review of applications for
licensure mobility.

A Data Quality Challenge
When Dr. Jack Terry was elected to the ARBO Board of Directors in June 2003, he brought with him from his work at the West Virginia Board of Optometry big ideas for the renovation and re-launch of ARBO’s Web site. His plan was to make www.ARBO.org a more comprehensive one-stop site for all of ARBO’s programs. This included creating a feature-rich Web site that would enable the general public, as well as ARBO members, to search a database of licensed optometrists. The new site would also include a certification information management section for members’ use only, where continuing education hours could be tracked.

These ideas were first presented to the ARBO Board of Directors in September 2003. The board expressed an interest in this vision and requested that a more detailed project plan be developed. Dr. Terry accepted the task, but had no idea what an undertaking he faced.

ARBO, as the representative organization for the North American boards of optometry, counts state boards as its members, not the individual practitioners. Thus, information on the individual practitioners had been provided exclusively to ARBO by its member state boards, but without a standardized format or process for doing so. While some state boards provided ARBO with detailed data on current licensed optometrists, others provided more minimal data. To complement, or in some cases to complete, the information it received from the state boards, ARBO also obtained optometrist data from other available databases, such as the National Boards (NB). However, these combined data sources often introduced duplicate records that contained different types of information, rather than providing the single, consolidated view of each licensed optometrist that was ARBO’s goal.

Dr. Terry realized that it would be impossible to develop a Web site that would allow for individual optometrist searches, let alone allow optometrists to track their continuing education, without first addressing the issue of the incomplete and often-duplicate practitioners’ data that ARBO had in its National Optometric DataBase (NODB).

Through his previous work with the West Virginia Board of Optometry Web site and his attendance at technology presentations and conferences, Dr. Terry knew that ARBO should be able to sift through the murky data to emerge with a single, consolidated and complete record for each optometrist that would contain license information, date of birth, graduating school, current address and a unique ID. For the best way to achieve these consolidated records, he contacted Innovative Systems.

ISI’s Team Provides the Solution
As a small organization, ARBO did not have the budget or personnel resources to tackle this problem alone. In order to keep the Web site project moving ahead, and costs manageable, they needed a solution that would allow them to outsource the data cleansing, integration and review project to a subject matter expert.

Dr. Terry chose Innovative Systems, not only because the company offered the solution ARBO was looking for, but, perhaps more importantly, because after conversations with Bill Nolan, his customer relationship manager, and Rich Olshefski, an ISI principal consultant, he was confident that ISI’s team would successfully complete the job.

“One of the reasons we needed a partner on this is because we are not data experts,” said Dr. Terry. “ISI’s team was able to help us quickly understand the data quality problems so we could jointly develop the right technology solution to our business problem.”

The first phase of the project involved standardizing and formatting the NB and NODB databases, so that records from these two data sets could first be matched together and then integrated into the existing ARBO practitioners database to create a single, super-data set of unique and complete records. After the first series of cleansing and matching using ISI’s data quality and integration software, a set of approximately 3,000 conflict, duplicate records remained. A team of Innovative Systems’ data analysts then reviewed each of the 3,000 records, ultimately resolving every conflict.

The time spent? The project took only about three weeks, from start to finish. And the result? ARBO achieved the intelligent customer data integration that they had been searching for — one complete record per optometrist and a new, accurate and complete database.

ARBO Moves Ahead
With the new ARBO database, Dr. Terry and the organization can confidently proceed with plans for the optometrist-centered Web site. ARBO will soon distribute Optometric Education (OE) cards to all optometrists in the new database, encouraging the practitioners to log on to the new Web site and confirm their information in ARBO’s records. After that, ARBO will begin utilizing both their newly created Web site and their newly cleansed and matched database to the fullest.

The Relationship Continues
ISI’s partnership with ARBO is not over yet, though. ARBO will continue to collect new and changed optometrist records and provide them to ISI on a quarterly basis for offsite change management, cleansing and matching, which will allow ARBO to maintain the integrity of their database without having to implement and manage costly software systems — the perfect solution for a small organization.

“Innovative Systems has been an extremely beneficial and useful partner,” said Dr. Terry. “I couldn’t be more pleased.”

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