Joe Crotty

My wife, Heather, and I just returned last week from a two week vacation (see the slide show) to Southern France and Northern Spain to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary.  The trip concluded with a five day pilgrimage to Lourdes, France site of St. Bernadette’s 18 Marian apparitions in 1858.  The main reason for going was to experience Lourdes, but with Heather getting two weeks off and me being unemployed we figured the chance for a lengthy trip of this nature might not come along again for a very long time.  We splurged on a car rental which in hind-sight was great as it give us the freedom to play the travel game at our leisure.

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I am starting to put more time into a current project to build an NFP application to do basic NaProTRACK™ biomarker charting.  My main objective is to build a charting tool that my wife could use in addition to her regular pencil/paper approach.  I think e-charting holds a couple of distinct advantages:

1. Beginners make lots of mistakes and the first few cycles usually end up being a mess trying to read.
2. The paper approach does not have much room, chart wise, for teachers and/or students to make notes about mistakes and easily re-arrange biomarkers.
3. Stamps placed over other stamps due to errors, mistakes, etc… are hard to denote.  Notice a trend developing here?
4. Paper charts don’t calculate anything for you meta data wise.  No post peak phase, total cycle days, etc…
5. Paper charts don’t tell you when you are making mistakes while your in the process of charting.

Envision an e-chart that has history for every biomarker including all changes, mistakes, and dates available at a mouse click combined with auto detect logic that senses when the user is making a mistake and prompts them with the correct data input and reason.  Pencil/paper is hard to argue against for the bare bones approach, but a web solution done right would be a great learning utility for all NFP practitioners.

The current NaProTRACK™ tool I have built is still in the early beta phase (FYI – more like Alpha in reality).  Architectural ground work, data model, and CMS have all been completed and integrated.  Just a matter of flusing out the functionality with robust OOP code and a boat load of testing – always easier said then done!  I’ll be back with an update in August.