FAQ
How the work runs
How do you charge?
A written scope with a price attached, agreed before anything starts. If the scope changes, we write the change down and price it then, so no invoice ever arrives as a surprise. Nothing is charged by the seat.
We have an audit coming. Is that the kind of thing you do?
Not in the way you might mean. I do not come in ahead of a review and get somebody else's system ready for it. That is its own trade and there are people who are good at it.
What I build is systems that are auditable to begin with. The trail from the source file to the published figure gets written while the thing is being built, because it falls out of building it properly. It is not a document somebody assembles afterwards from memory and old email.
A system built that way does not need preparing. You answer the reviewer by opening it and pointing.
What do we own when the work is finished?
The code, the data and the accounts. All of it, in your name, from early on. The written scope says exactly what that covers before anything gets built, so nobody is negotiating ownership at the end of a project, when the leverage is uneven and everyone is tired.
Scope
What data does the work need?
The least that will answer the question. That is often counts and totals with no individual records in them at all, and a surprising amount of good work never needs more.
Where a question genuinely does need record-level data, that work happens inside your environment, under your agreements. Nothing identifiable rests on a system of mine.
Working out which level an analysis actually needs is usually the first useful thing I do, and it tends to settle most of the paperwork that would otherwise follow.
What is outside what you do?
Four things I turn down.
- Operating an authorized hosting environment of my own. I deploy onto infrastructure your organization has already authorized, and I will not claim an authorization I do not hold.
- Standing up or re-platforming an HL7 or FHIR interface engine. I read what comes out of one and build against it.
- Native mobile applications. A browser page covers most field collection, and where it genuinely does not, that is a different vendor.
- Builds resting on a per-seat licence, because a chart that costs money every time a new person looks at it ends up as a screenshot in an email.
A question this page did not answer?
Send it. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Email me hello@vectoranalytics.org