Overview
The client is a Chicago based healthcare software products and consulting services provider startup with special focus on clinical and non-clinical practice management systems. The Project was to build a Practice Management System (PMS).
Challenges
The proposed project was the development of a specialized PMS for behavioral healthcare organizations that deliver care to clients with the objective of providing the following benefits:
- Easy and intuitive tasks management interface
- Comprehensive tools that simplify the following activities
- Data processing
- Document management
- Activity Scheduling
- Messaging
- Follow-up management
- Data analysis and workflow management
- Account receivables management
- Interfacing with Insurance/managed care organizations
- Program management
- Electronic document management
Solution
e-Zest’s solution architect group architected a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for PMS with following architectural highlights:
- Development of multi-tier architecture using .NET technologies with Windows Forms interface for presentation tier, C# for business logic components and ADO.NET for the data access layer accessing persistent data store from SQL Server 2000 database
- Object based model using UML for overall software design. System architecture was modeled in such a way that all objects in the system communicate with each other with the help of multiple interfaces that are provided
- Architecture provided loose coupling between components
- Management of connection state was abstracted from the application
- Application architecture provided the facility to detect the presence or absence of network connectivity, thus enabling the application to behave according to its online or offline state
- Application architecture provided the ability of caching the required data so that the application can continue to function even when the network connection is not available
- Critical element of application architecture was synchronization of the client application state and/or data with the server when the network connection becomes available
- Provided the same programming model for the application in both online and offline modes for smooth transitions between them without affecting the user experience
- Provided extensible interfaces for capabilities such as connection detection, and queuing
- Proprietary, highly secure, stable and high performance relational database MS-SQL Server was used for centralized persistent storage of object information
- A working architectural prototype was prepared to evaluate architectural framework; address risks by measuring performance, scalability, and ease; as well as to gain confidence that proposed approach works.
Conclusion
The e-Zest team architected and developed a high performance, extensible and scalable architecture by extracting best capabilities of .NET technologies and the reuse of existing PMS framework for the development of a non-clinical PMS to reduce product development costs and time to market the non-clinical PMS product. It also showed a flexible and dynamic spirit by closely coordinating with the clinical PMS team, by performing quick resource ramp ups and by quickly learning a new web based tool in order to give the client exactly what they want.
Download a HealthCare Practice Management System Case Study in PDF.
