“We no longer fret when our customers request changes to their reports.”
Bitscopic | United States
Joel Mewton, CTO
15 July 2022
https://bitscopic.com/
Bitscopic is a healthcare analytics software company. Our mission is to provide tools, insights, expertise and platforms that enable better decisions and improve healthcare outcomes.
In the past we leveraged a handful of free & open source libraries for our PDF reporting needs. When new reports had to be built, it meant code had to be written. While the libraries handled the grunt work of creating PDFs, the code still contained layout, formatting, text size and style, etc. Sort of like writing a webpage for every report.
Writing this code was often highly redundant and always extremely time consuming. And when our customers requested changes to the reports, the report code would need to be tweaked and heavily tested.
When the COVID pandemic began, Bitscopic was tapped to provide reports containing SARS-CoV-2 variant analysis information to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The project had to move fast and the reporting requirements were not well-defined.
It was time to look for a better solution… Bitscopic performed some market research and identified a handful of potential products. Many of these were cloud-based which always raises concerns for Bitscopic’s government customers. We focused our efforts on solutions that could be installed on-premise and identified Docmosis Tornado as a top-contender.
We were able to get Tornado up and running with some prototype reports within a couple hours.
The templating style is intuitive and very easy to use. The PDF Generation API is straightforward and a very good mix of tooling while not getting too much in the way.
Being hosted as a web service, Tornado is cross-platform which is ideal for Bitscopic as we use a variety of languages in our products. It’s super simple to host – both in a dev environment as well as production. And, most importantly, it just works!
We no longer fret when our customers request changes to their reports – what took hours and days before has been reduced to minutes in a Microsoft Word text editor.
Tornado is a joy to use and would still be a great deal at twice the price!