Case Studies

Group Workflow Management System at VHN

Back Ground:
Virtual Health Networks is catering to IT needs of primary health care market. Their target customers are medium to small sized medical groups who can not afford to either purchase and install huge information systems products or employ a dedicated IT staff to develop custom IT applications. Such organizations are also unable to afford a large administrative staff due to expensive manpower and even more expensive IT solutions. The VHN applications serve the needs of medical groups (which is an association of doctors in one or different specialties), by delivering effective IT solutions at an affordable cost which allow them to help patients, clinicians and their staff work, service and communicate effectively within organization.

Group Workflow Management System is one such offering from VHN, which bring the different entities within the span of a medical group together to manage the workflow starting from patient request for a service to delivery to the service. System allows various players like Providers, Nurses, Hospitals, Clinics, Pharmacies, Managed Care Providers, Test Labs to collaborate at different layers and levels to track an activity from start to finish. A request for appointment, a request for conferencing with physician, Prescription Refills, Specialist Searches, Referral Requests, Test Inquiry Request are some examples of activities which trigger a process in the flow. System allows for automatic viewing of lab results, archival and retrieval of patient history and records, drug warehouse, alerts for patient allergy or overuse are some of the features built into the system for reducing the medication errors or undesirable adverse drug event.

Situation:
VHN needs to be able to kick start the project within a short span of 15 days, with a team which is quick and adept enough to understand the application requirements and start churning out the modules. Keeping its market in mind VHN also looks for a nimble team with fast pace and less bureaucratic overheads to keep the time to delivery and cost of overheads to minimum. A team, which is as good in Java as it is with CPT or ICDM codes.

Challenge:
The main challenge in the project was keeping up with the continuously changing requirements. Application had a very rough picture in the mindset of the client. The client had to give a shape and structure to the ideas and convey them to the development team. Main difficulty was to have flexibility in the development team to accommodate oncoming sizzling features and ideas coming from the business team, without affecting the work on current modules.

Solution:
Terraint built up a team of business experts, which it kept close to the client to engage in continuous discussion and brainstorming, and updating the development team offshore immediately. The onsite team, with immediate access to the client, would jot down the requirements in a format conducive to the development team, aggregate and classify them in the current, past or future modules to make it easy for the development team to continue working with out frustrations. Onsite team would have its own version control system for requirements, testing environment for system testing and acceptance testing environment for client testing. Any project level issues would be raised with the project manager responsible for managing the offshore show. From offshore, daily status reports, weekly project updates, module sign offs would help onsite team keep client abreast of project progress.

Outcome:
Terraint succeeded in delivering version 1.0 and 1.1 without slipping any delivery dates. Client made presentations to his customers on time, to the delight of company investors. Terraint team provided the support and maintenance for a period 6 months until the project reached its maturity.

Expertise used:
Apache WebServer, IBM Websphere, IBM Visual Age, RedHat Linux, J2EE technologies, Oracle 9i, Digital Mail Encryption.

Integration with third party ICDM, CPT and Allergy systems.

Development of Patient Allergy and Diagnosis archival system.