Case Study: Application Development – Health Management Solution

The Client:

A health care services company

The Business Challenge:

Links was asked to construct an integrated web-based application to allow our customer to effectively compete in the disease-management (DM) industry and address the health management needs of its numerous clients and participants.

The Solution:

Links first worked with the customer to gather their requirements. After careful analysis, Links determined current and future needs of their numerous clients and participants based on projections showing incremental growth over the next 5 years.

We then analyzed our customer's current systems to determine what core business function each system provided, while further determining any commonality that existed among them. Following the analysis process, our customer's architectural standards were studied to both understand them and to assure that they accounted for the new system's characteristics. Finally, a strategy that satisfied both their short-term and long-term goals and requirements was proposed. The proposed solution allowed our customer's existing manually intensive DM systems to function as-is, while the new system was being developed according to their stated requirements.

Links' first step was to build our customer's architectural standards to meet the requirements of the new system. This involved identifying the standards that needed to be added, identifying what development and infrastructure software upgrades were necessary, and establishing design and development guidelines for these new standards. While the architecture was being upgraded, the system was implemented using an object-oriented approach, which included modeling the system in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The new system was architected as a distributed three-tier web application according to the Java 2 Enterprise Edition specifications (J2EE).

Links developed the solution using the following:

  • The infrastructure software involved was IBM WebSphere on AIX, IBM DB2 on AIX and OS/390, and IBM CICS Connection Gateway on AIX
  • The development environment included BEA Java Application Platform to an Oracle database backend. A process for managed releases was also created
  • The business logic tier was implemented using Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), while the presentation tier was implemented using Servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP), HTML, and JavaScript
  • Links was also tasked with providing all the associated documentation required for the FDA and HIPAA Validation Processes.