Medical & Healthcare Product Distribution Workflow Automation Software Application Outsourcing

Application Description:
The Solution presented is a very complex Oxygen Distribution Workflow Automation Application that has three parts:

• Driver Application
• Respiratory Therapists (RT) Application
• Billing Application

The Driver’s role is to deliver and collect the equipment such as Stationeries, Cylinders, Concentrators and Piped-in Tanks to the hospitals, APS Facility and home care patients.

Respiratory Therapists are responsible for the installation of the equipment, reporting of missing equipment and noting the usage of equipment used at a particular facility.

Billing Application is responsible for handling and settling of accounts.

The Driver and RT Application components are primarily data capture systems. This data gets stored in the local databases on Laptops and gets synchronized to the Enterprise Database. No one will be accessing the data at the server side for anything other than to print the RT’s logs and the Driver’s logs to paper.

The RT’s logs are compared to the Driver’s logs and calculated together to tell us how much oxygen has been delivered to a facility and used by an individual patients. Finally, these two numbers will be compared and then pushed from the database to the Billing System to generate an invoice.

There are very complex rules for billing and invoicing of equipment, gas & Soft-goods and these rules are incorporated in the Enterprise database. The Setup and Billing Applications run on the Enterprise Database.

The general layout of the system look as follows:

The Drivers and the RT use Laptops with Aircards connected to CDPD wireless network periodically throughout the day. The laptops have at least 10GB of hard drive space and 64MB of RAM.

The Enterprise System at the Headquarters is a Dell 8450 server with 6 PIII Processors and 4GB or RAM. This is attached to an HP4/40 tape array and to a 3TB RAID system. The server and RAID is dedicated for this solution only.

The Application Architecture is a three-tier - The GUI tier being Flash, the logic tier being ASP and the database tier being MS SQL 7.0. For the Laptop Applications, the database tier is MS Access. A three-tier design provides flexibility to allow change of GUI, Logic and Data layers at any time without affecting the other layers or minimally affecting the other layers.

Synchronization is an important aspect of this project. It is a two way process. As the RT does work in the field, the RT will be creating records in the database. After the RT completes work, the RT will select finish from the menu, the system should then look for an ODBC connection back to the main database. The records that have been changed at the RT device should be pushed to the database at the enterprise system. Likewise, records that relate to RT’s that have been changed at the main database because of synchronization of drivers and other RT’s should update the database on the local laptop device. The following concerns should be considered:

The Synchronization process between the Access and SQL Server Databases is a two-way process since the tables can be updated at either end. Also, the changes made by a Driver on one Access Database need to be transferred to all the other Access Databases on other Drivers Laptops.

Duration
2003 - 2004

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