At AIS, we’re committed to delivering transformative solutions and outcomes, and that’s exactly what we’re doing for Healthcare Receivable Specialists, Inc. (HRSI). Everyone knows that data redundancy can be a productivity killer, so we’re utilizing a cloud-based hosting solution via Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their new application that will help eliminate the problem. The AWS hosting option will also keep costs down without sacrificing performance and positioning for HIPAA compliance. Additionally, our solution provides a self-service means to access the status of their applications through their entire business process. Keep reading to learn more!
Background
An organization with more than 250 employees, HRSI offers healthcare providers with services for receivable management. While accounting for the financial burdens placed on the healthcare industry to receive reimbursement for treating of uninsured patients, HRSI programs work with providers, to cost effectively obtain, compensation for patient care.
HRSI strives to structure its operations to maximize its ability to provide a consistent service to its clients, while at the same time providing the flexibility that allows its staff to be creative and effective. This approach allows the organization to customize its products to meet the individual requirements and needs of its clients at the same time it assures the quality of its services.
The Challenge
AIS began working with HRSI to develop a replacement case management system. AccessLine (a ‘green screen’ mainframe system) was not user-friendly in terms of automated reporting and could not be fully integrated with other solutions. Other issues included the following:
- No readily accessible or open API for integrations or reporting
- Text fields which were unmanageable to perform intelligent validations
- Redundancy due to lack of integration with other systems
Our firm has been called to develop a solution to identify the true system of record for all given pieces of information and through integrations or field consolidation and sharing, eliminate any duplicate data entry. Developing the new Medical Assistance Tracking System (MATS), would solve many, if not all, of the shortcomings of the old system, which is important to stay on-pace and ahead of the competition in this field. Additionally, AIS would need to determine a viable hosting option for the new application as they do not have the resources to host their own robust, redundant, mission critical on premises infrastructure. Ultimately, HRSI needs to provide equal or better services at a lower cost than their competitors, and for us, the entire project is geared toward that goal.
Solution
Our objective is to design, build and deploy an MVC3 application that enables HRSI’s business processes and business objects. The system will support the organization’s entire workflow process as well as allow for full-fledged management of business data. Security access will be granted only on a need to know basis; this will be enforced using a combination of an Active Directory-based ASP.NET Authentication Provider and a Custom ASP.NET Role Provider utilizing Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) for authentication.
The MATS solution will also provide better guidance to representatives working cases as well as the management team. Calendar events will be automatically created as well as self-administered to give representatives and management insight into their overdue and upcoming case work. This calendaring system will also give management insight into representative performance. Dashboards will be made available that are user-specific and provide visibility to all of the various roles’ key metrics. Additionally, MATS integration with various third party services, databases and processes will be a key characteristic of the new system which will differentiate HRSI from its competitors.
In order to determine the best hosting option, AIS performed a comparative analysis to document the considerations in deciding the best hosting environment for MATS solution. A number of factors – including cost, SLA, business continuity, performance, automation and future growth – were considered as part of the analysis. It was determined that both AWS and Rackspace offer capable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms that can meet the needs of the MATS application; however, ultimately, AIS recommended AWS (an AIS partner).
The determination to utilize AWS was made because it offered a wider feature set at a lower cost. AIS created detailed topology diagrams to assist HRSI with visualizing the proposed hardware architecture and also prepared several detailed, low-level cost options for configuring the infrastructure with varying degrees of redundancy, disaster recovery support and costs. After the final configuration was decided, AIS went on to successfully design, implement and maintain this infrastructure which now hosts several of HRSI’s mission critical systems.
Business and Technical Achievements
AIS will play a pivotal role in the migrating, consolidating and standardizing data from HRSI’s old solution to the more robust MATS solution, while successfully utilizing AWS as the cloud-hosting provider of choice. As a result, it is anticipated that the organization will see the following outcomes needed to achieve their objectives:
- Managed workflow
- Intuitive dashboards and calendars
- Efficient reporting
- Document repository management and generation
- Data integrity through normalized relational database design
AIS will deliver a solution with enhanced capabilities, including the following:
- Interactive functionality and screen design
- System integration to reduce data redundancy
- Enhanced security and authentication
Technology
- ASP.NET
- Active Directory Federation Services
- AWS
- SQL Server Reporting Services
- Secure FTP
