Large Government Healthcare Agency 

Our client serves millions of veterans and provides a wide range of medical, surgical, and rehabilitative services in facilities located around the world. Their portal offers veterans a single point of access to benefits information, health information, and special programs through a unified interface. The portal also provides veterans with personal and secure online journals and health information logs.

The Challenge

Our client wanted to upgrade the calendar on their portal to communicate with their legacy medical records system to obtain timely healthcare information for patients. They also wanted to enhance the calendar's usability to ensure Section 508 Compliance.

The Solution

Ironworks Government Solutions prepared a vision document and detailed requirements for a calendar application that would provide veterans with personal healthcare information. A comprehensive buy vs. build analysis was performed which ultimately lead Ironworks Government Solutions to construct a custom-built calendar application for veterans and our client’s staff. The calendar's API was designed so that each patient could view personalized events from the client’s Health Information System such as doctor appointments or personal health reminders along with self-entered events. Specific tasks included:

• Conducting workshops and surveys of key stakeholders to identify potential uses for the proposed solution
• Conducting an online survey of veterans to assess interest in the proposed calendar
• Evaluating more than twenty calendar solutions to recommend buy vs. build decision
• Preparing Use Cases, Software Architecture and Software Design Documents
• Developing source code for the calendar running as a portlet on BEA WebLogic Portal
• Performing Quality Assurance and adhering to the client’s performance test standards
• Delivering the calendar portlet to the client for successful deployment to production

Going forward, patients will be able to visit the portal to opt-in to receive email reminders of future doctor appointments, prescription refills, and general healthcare reminders. These emails will have links that send veterans to the portal for detailed information about the reminders.

The Results

• The new calendar was deployed to the client’s national and admin portals with zero defects.
• All old calendar data from the off-the-shelf BEA calendar portlet was migrated to the new calendar.
• The client staff was trained on the procedures for publishing national and regional events that appear on everyone's calendar.
• The calendar continues to be enhanced to support new sources of events from the client’s legacy medical systems.