Easy Exporting

While Alinity has many operational and analytical reports built in, there may be times where you want to export your data to perform your own analysis and reporting in other tools, like Excel.

The export feature was created for that purpose.

You may also need to export data to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) or a Provincial Provider Registry. Interfaces to those organization are built directly in to Alinity and you do not need to perform manual exports for them, but if you have a requirement to provide data to another 3rd party, the Export feature can help.

Exporting Data Sets

To get started, login through the administrator’s portal using your email/password combination as usual.

The most robust reporting tool available in Alinity is the Database Management module, which allows you to report on information from every field in every Master Table in your entire implementation. However, even without this optional module, Alinity still has powerful, easy to use exporting functions.

You can export data from all Alinity search pages, including People, Registrations, Audits, Profile Updates, and several others. To export the relevant data, just navigate to the appropriate screen.

We’re going to export registrant data from the People screen, but the process will be the same for all exportable screens.

We start by clicking the green Export/Download button in the Search criteria bar. Whichever registrants are returned by our search criteria will be included in the export, so if we want to export data on every user in our system, we can just set our view to all, make sure there’s no limit on the number of records that will be returned, and then run an empty Search.

Now we’re ready to start the export. Click the green export/download button.

A new browser tab will automatically and take us to the export screen, where we can choose the data source for the information, and select the file format we want. The vast majority of exports go to Excel though, so we’ll keep that as a default.

Now, we begin selecting the specific information we want to export. If we want to get everything, we can just add every field, but that will export a tremendous amount of information, so just select a few for now.

If we’re unsure of the information that will be returned, we can click the question mark beside each label for more information, and if we know the type of information we want but not the exact field label, we can always Search. If we grab the wrong one, we can just delete it. We can also adjust the order in which the fields will appear on our export by either using the buttons or dragging the fields into order. If this is an export we’re going to use often, we can save it as a default just by clicking checkbox at the bottom.

When we’re ready, we click the Export button, and we’re taken to the export details page, where we can see the status of the export. Depending on the export size, it may take a few minutes for the process to complete.

When it’s ready, we can immediately download our new file.

Now that we’ve learned how to do a mass export, let’s see how we can get at specific sets of registrant data.

Exporting Specific Data Slices

The quickest and easiest way to refine our data set is to use filters and quick searches to return just the users we want to export information on.

If we’re looking for a very specific set of users, we may need to have a custom quick search configured—contact the Alinity help desk for support in creating new custom quick searches.

Another great way to get a specific set of registrants is to use Alinity’s pinning function to build our own data set.

By pinning results from different quick searches, we can create a very specific group of registrants to report on. Now when we click the Export button, we’ll only get information from these 50 or so users. Again, we can select the fields we want, arrange them, and then export and download the information.

Once we have our exported files, we can open them and begin our analysis.

Since we’re using Excel, we can quickly convert the information into data tables, filter the data to see exactly the slice of data we want, and even visualize the information into charts and graphs to make it easily digestible. Microsoft and the Microsoft community provides excellent support and resource materials on how to use Excel’s data manipulation tools, such as Pivot tables, to help you better understand your membership.

Regulatory authorities have many uses for exporting their data, and Alinity makes it simple to get at the precise information they need in a format that can be easily manipulated and transformed.