Case Studies

Custom Application Reduces Operating Costs, Improves System Performance

Project at a Glance
RDA assisted our client with the development of an application for specimen handling and result processing to replace multiple legacy applications. The new system brings a unified interface to the lab worker, drastically reducing time spent on training. The new system also allows users to isolate and report on highly specific, detailed metrics.

About Our Client

RDA's client is one of the world's largest clinical laboratories, offering a broad range of genomic/esoteric tests.

Background

RDA's client has experienced significant growth, including the merger and acquisition of many smaller laboratories, that has resulted in a variety of in-house developed applications used to support laboratory operations. Numerous problems were associated with the company's dependency on these applications:

• The applications were becoming expensive to maintain as they were developed in languages that are no longer in common use, such as MUMPS, C ++, Visual Basic, and COBOL on the mainframe, with tremendous lead-times required for any changes.
• In addition, the applications were complex, requiring extensive training and support for the laboratory technicians. In some extreme examples, they had to use numerous applications daily, many of which had overlapping functionality. Technicians were spending time rekeying data, which is inefficient, and each time there was turnover in a lab, the training and support staff needed to educate new personnel on all of these applications.
• Also, the legacy systems were vulnerable to system outages. Outages could lead to a complete work stoppage, which has caused the company to suspend operations at laboratories for several days. Even transient outages impact lab-processing, as almost all of the legacy lab applications have no ability to cache data and perform synchronous (ask-and-wait) requests for data.
• The applications did not easily allow for load balancing processing across laboratories. In times of emergencies, it was difficult for staff to absorb work from other labs, correctly receive payment for the work, and route results back to doctors.
• Finally, our client could not produce accurate operational metrics such as cost per test, reagent use or production volume.

Therefore, the company decided to unify the multitude of applications into a single, modern solution that would simplify maintenance and operations as well as address the outage vulnerabilities of the legacy applications. Our client envisioned a modern, well-architected, and visually appealing application that would streamline operations.

Solution Detail

RDA assisted our client with the development of an application for specimen handling and result processing, which will eventually replace multiple legacy applications that interface to a mainframe application. The new system addresses the performance and reliability issues that have occurred in the past and streamlines as well as simplifies operations by enabling laboratory technicians to be more productive.

RDA’s solution provides our client with a highly available, browser-based Web architecture. The solution is based on proven approaches and design patterns to provide a maintainable and extensible architecture. During the course of meetings with our client, RDA had the opportunity to review the design requirements to ensure that the approach would address the company's needs for fault tolerance and reliability.

The architecture created for the new system is reusable and capable of hosting additional modules. The first phase of the application addresses manual results entry.

Special attention was given to enhancements in user productivity by implementing an intuitive, streamlined application that not only meets operational requirements but is also visually appealing and intuitive to end users.

Our client has identified eight labs to participate in a pilot, in which specific tests will be run side-by-side with both the new system and the legacy systems. Once the pilot is launched, the participants will be providing usability feedback from a lab-floor perspective. The plan is to pilot the new system for a specific time period and then roll out the system to a larger population in additional lab facilities.

Benefits

Process / Efficiency
Today, specimen processing involves a handful of systems, several working against differing databases or back-end systems. The new system brings a unified interface to the lab worker, drastically reducing the training and learning curve. Specific highlights include:

• Single UI paradigm: Today, each system uses unique keystroke combinations, menu names, and data entry mechanisms. The legacy tools tend to use older-style YI paradigms (akin to green-screen apps and forms apps of yesteryear). The new system takes a modern approach, implementing a Web-based interface and following navigational hints / breadcrumbs common in today’s WinForms applications.
• Near real-time data availability: In the current suite of lab applications, lab techs typically request data (such as tests to run on a specimen) as needed. There are well-known traffic curves (e.g. at the start of an 8-hour shift, everyone in the lab is “pulling” their test lists from the mainframe) that add significant delays to the data-gathering process. The new system alleviates these bottlenecks by proactively extracting mainframe-based specimen data and caching them in a performant SQL database (currently DB2). The system then provides near real-time access to this data, with no significant delays during high-traffic times.

New Capabilities
As a SQL-based system, the new system can easily provide metrics on current-day in progress, past days, statistics per lab, test type, or even lab worker.

Technically Speaking

In order to meet established performance requirements and allow the laboratories to function even when communication channels to the mainframe are down, the application leverages DB2 as a local data store that serves as a local cache for data between the new system and the mainframe.

The solution platform includes the following:

Category	Description
Transient  Database	DB2
Language	C# + ASP.NET, with Telerik custom controls
Development IDE	Visual Studio Team System 2008
Framework	.NET Framework 3.0
Source Control	Team Foundation Server
Server Platform	Windows Server 2003 or 2008
Client Platform	Windows XP Professional SP2 or Windows Vista
Browser	Internet Explorer v6 or v7