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Medullan September Newsletter with Featured Client: Consumer's Medical Resource
9/3/2008 - Welcome to Medullan's quarterly newsletter. In this issue, we are pleased to feature our new client -- Consumer’s Medical Resource. CMR’s Director of Operations describes their approach in leveraging technology to fuel growth and gain efficiencies. Medullan team members share their insight on technology choices and the Agile methodology in developing solutions for CMR.
Featured Client: Consumer’s Medical Resource. High-touch, personalized services are key to success.
Employees of Fortune 500 companies turn to Consumer’s Medical Resource (CMR) for knowledgeable advice, attention to detail, and a highly personalized experience. And when CMR sought out a workflow solution for their own growing business, it is not surprising that these same values led them to choose Medullan.
Headquartered in Pembroke, MA, Consumer’s Medical Resource provides medical decision support and education to patients and their families. CMR’s customers are Fortune 500 companies seeking to help their employees spend healthcare dollars wisely. Employees utilize CMR's services to obtain information about a newly diagnosed serious condition or chronic disease. The patient receives a personalized package with a highly tailored report and recent literature most relevant to his or her unique situation. This helps patients ask the right questions and make educated decisions about their treatment. To ensure that clients' needs are fully met, CMR always follows up with phone calls and additional materials if needed.
Operating procedures are well established at this twelve-year-old company, yet as the company grows, so does its need to manage higher volumes of data and reporting. To continue growing successfully, they know they need a robust system. Additionally, CMR aims to augment current services by increasing client access to information via an online searchable library of content vetted by CMR's physicians. Medullan is building both the workflow management system as well as the expanded searchable website scheduled to launch in January 2009.
LuAnn Christianson, Director of Operations at CMR, commented, “Medullan was responsive from the very beginning. The other firms we met immediately wanted to go to off-the-shelf solutions without trying to learn about what we do. Medullan took the time to understand our business in considerable depth before proposing a solution. They held a workshop at CMR to understand our needs and goals before they even came up with a proposal.”
Medullan used an “Agile” methodology to best accommodate CMR’s needs and the fact that all the answers were not known up front. Medullan’s Project Manager, Brian Sangudi explains, “the Agile methodology allowed us to present a working prototype early in the process, get feedback from CMR and make more informed decisions for building the rest of the solution. The process was iterative and flexible and allowed for a high degree of collaboration with CMR team members, further ensuring that the end result would fully meet CMR’s goals and needs.”
Consumer’s Medical Resource (CMR) wanted to enhance their information management tools to support their growth and gain efficiencies. CMR also wanted to develop a client web portal so that clients could access CMR’s vast library of literature via the web.
Technology Choices – Build vs Buy!
Medullan evaluated many technology options based on several factors including Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), compatibility with Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodologies, and interoperability with CMR’s existing platforms. In many cases, using an off-the-shelf package would have required CMR to make significant changes to their processes and workflow to fit within the capabilities of that package. That was not desirable for CMR and so In lieu of off-the-shelf packages, Medullan designed and developed a custom solution that revolved around CMR’s existing service model and unique needs and was also cost effective.
Medullan combined best practices for data modeling with user-centric interface design, in an iterative and collaborative process, to create a highly usable application for CMR’s workflow. For the client web portal, Medullan worked with CMR to determine a solution for search and document management which integrated tightly with the workflow solution. CMR's expanded web site will be an n-Tier .Net application which fit well with the RAD methodology.
Medullan worked closely with CMR to determine the best deployment strategy and helped procure servers, evaluate network infrastructure, ensure proper licensing for new operating systems, databases, and other parts of the IT solution.
HIPAA Compliance
CMR takes privacy and security very seriously and Medullan was sensitive to the requirement for HIPAA compliance throughout the process. Medullan developed an overall strategy for securing both physical and logical IT resources to ensure HIPAA compliance. The team identified requirements for accessing, storing, and using PHI (Protected Health Information); created best practices for computer usage by CMR employees to protect against low-barrier privacy risks, and helped outline plans for backup security.
Are you Ready for Agile? When to go Agile.
Is an Agile methodology right for your project? Here are some quick tips on when Agile is the right way to go – and when it’s not.
- What is Agile?
- How does one decide whether or not to use an Agile methodology>
- When is the right time to make that decision?
- What should one be prepared for when using Agile?
- Why was agile the right choice for CMR’s project?
- Does Medullan do a lot of agile projects – why is Medullan well suited for Agile projects?
What is Agile?
Agile is a project management and software development methodology that emphasizes four primary themes:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Agile finds value in the factors on the right but emphasizes the value of the items on the left. This approach to software delivery is very well-suited for software projects with diverse or ambiguous requirements, that involve extensive or exclusive input from end users in feature and requirement specification, or when a project needs to be highly responsive to customer feedback in short intervals. Agile is less well-suited for highly structured projects with pre-existing analysis and design collateral, projects where customer and end-user input is limited or not applicable, or short and tightly scheduled projects where there is limited time to respond to feedback usually solicited during iterative cycles.
How does one decide whether or not to use Agile? When is the right time to make that decision?
The decision to use Agile can typically be made very quickly based on the above factors and should be made prior to the development of significant design and implementation artifacts. This speaks strongly to the Agile emphasis of responsiveness to change. As a methodology, Agile sees quick response to change as a way to forego expensive investment into development where value has not been fully assessed or quantified. Entering into a full waterfall-style design and analysis phase before making the decision to leverage more Agile approaches often leads to the development of artifacts for features which are never implemented or are implemented with substantial variation from the initial design as a result of iterative feedback.
What should one be prepared for when using Agile?
Agile's focus on individuals and interactions often means that development teams and client teams alike will require notable overhead in detailing the requirements of agreed upon scope throughout the project. This is often referred to as the conversation. For the development team, this overhead is absorbable due to a lack of overhead incurred from documentation, another feature of Agile. Customers interested in an Agile approach for the delivery of their software project should be aware of the time required from many stakeholders within their teams in order to ensure a successful collaborative development effort.
Why was agile the right choice for CMR’s project?
Medullan and CMR agreed to do Agile after both groups agreed that there were various factors that made a flexible and collaborative development appraoch the most effective to deliver a high value, high impact product for CMR's needs. CMR came to Medullan with some fairly high-level requirements, but very little preference on how the problems described should be solved. Medullan recognized that CMR had several stakeholders who had competing but equally valuable priorities for what would be in the final implementation. By using Agile, Medullan was able to identify a broad range of potential features to be included in the implementation scope very quickly and determine the size of effort involved in implementing each feature. Medullan was able to create a backlog of all possible features to be implemented, and after an initial agreement of scope continued to work with CMR to identify changing priorities, allowing Medullan to react and change the initial plan quickly with little or no impact on the project budget or schedule.
Does Medullan do a lot of agile projects – why is Medullan well suited for Agile projects?
Medullan uses Agile whenever a project meets the appropriate criteria and the client is comfortable with an approach that may not definitively present the exact nature of the deliverable prior to the beginning of the engagement. In the health care space, Medullan often engages in projects where there are a diverse number of stakeholders and a lot of potential for changing priorities during the lifetime of the engagement. Agile offers a powerful set of tools to embrace the reality of Information Technology in Health Care and positions Medullan for delivery of software that maximizes value and client satisfaction.