I'm surprised that MS Access didn't take this kind of niche.
I know it's a pretty shitty program to use - excel is much more user friendly. If MS had made excel, but have all the features of access in it...
I know it's a pretty shitty program to use - excel is much more user friendly. If MS had made excel, but have all the features of access in it...
In PowerQuery & PowerPivot there are also no practical limits on the number of rows of data you can have (other than the impact on processing time, clearly hundreds of millions of records might start to be a problem). It's not quite access - it doesn't actually persist/store the data, just aggregates it from other sources which is probably what is required here.
Access is a little legacy and would have it's own issues. I think in reality it depends on how you are ingesting data (which is probably hospitals submitting excel templates or similar?). Maybe these could be automatically aggregated and put onto an analytics platform? (e.g. PowerBi). Hospitals could maybe report it on a portal, but I'm not convinced that the leadership would have wanted to change the established process (because of operational focus, change reduction & risk).
Weaknesses of Access in no particular order: very poor multi-user/multi-device-access features. No real concept of servers. Buggy, had a nasty habit of corrupting its custom file format causing data loss (Excel never does this). Does expect you to understand SQL, data normalisation, etc. VBA just about serviceable for a spreadsheet but not good enough for a 'real' database-backed app.
Probably someone could try and make a better Access. There are surely lots of startups doing that already, along with hosting. All the "no code" tools that are out there, etc. Access had the advantage of coming with Office so lots of people had it already, whereas today's subscription based services that host your data have incremental cost.
Base has very solid data storage foundations (including the ability to connect to real database servers) but the UI is very buggy and is painful to fight with. Note I said 'fight with' rather than 'use.'
Base seems to have a fair bit of potential, however, if someone where to pour some money and/or time into developing it further.