IT Planning & Custom Developed Mobile Solution for a National Health Plan Organization
Services: Strategic Information Systems Planning
The Challenge
A Fortune 500 managed care organization that manages publicly funded health programs had been utilizing a web-based case and disease management information system for several years. While the system was effective at managing clinical functions for the majority of the organization’s beneficiaries, significant manual intervention was needed to complete documentation for the elderly, blind and disabled beneficiaries.
Health risk assessments were conducted in the homes of these members by service coordinators. The existing system did not have remote operating capabilities, requiring the service coordinators to document assessments on paper and later manually enter them into the system. This often led to errors, incomplete documentation and data entry delays that significantly impacted operations.
Cumberland was engaged to conduct a requirements analysis and evaluation to help achieve organizational consensus on whether or not to purchase, build or reuse an existing system to resolve these issues.
Cumberland’s Approach
Cumberland led a scored, objective gap-fit assessment to determine the approach which would best meet the business requirements.
The following project objectives were defined for the initial gap-fit assessment:
- Understand the capabilities of the existing case and disease management system
- Document prioritized business requirements that were necessary to meet the organization’s needs for managing the elderly, blind and disabled population
- Perform objective functional and cost assessments of the alternatives: custom development, package implementation, existing system or hybrid approach
- Present clear, concise and fact-based alternatives, the associated opportunities and challenges to the organization’s executive team
The result of the gap-fit assessment was a recommendation to implement a hybrid approach, including a custom developed mobile iPad solution that would integrate with the organization’s existing back end case and disease management system.
The organization’s executive team agreed with the gap-fit assessment recommendation and made a decision to move forward with the implementation as the hybrid approach would best meet the organization’s business objectives within the timeline and budget available for the project. Cumberland was asked to manage the implementation of the new system.
The following project objectives were defined for the implementation phase:
- Establish a project charter, project governance and overall project management plan for the implementation
- Manage project issues, risks, budget and milestones
- Conduct a current state analysis of the existing business process for managing elderly, blind and disabled beneficiaries
- Document future state business requirements to be implemented in the new hybrid system
- Manage the development effort to build the iPad application and integrate the application with the existing case and disease management back-end system
- Conduct configuration and testing of the final solution
- Provide go-live support for implementations of the new hybrid system
Results
Cumberland managed the development and testing of the system and conducted successful implementations across seven of the organization’s markets. Data from in-home health risk assessments completed by service coordinators for the organization’s elderly, blind and disabled beneficiaries is now electronically transmitted back to the master system, improving documentation accuracy and operational efficiencies. Cumberland was subsequently engaged to manage a system-wide optimization project and asked to lead a number of additional high priority projects for the organization.