The Nuts and Bolts: Technical Info
From the start, HomeAdvantageTM was designed to answer the business challenge facing home health agencies. Sweeping regulatory change and massive industry upheaval created the opportunity to answer the productivity and information management challenges plaguing agencies. A new solution required three things:
- Cost-Effective: as agency revenues were slashed, cost-control was required to survive; the solution has to be cost-effective and show a positive bottom-line effect quickly.
- Productivity Enabling: efficiency is the name of the game. Agencies must gain control of their operations. That means automation--measuring work, speeding workflow and collections, and finding performance gaps early. Information tools better address end-to-end processes, not just individual departments.
- Ubiquitous and Useable: agency consolidation is forcing managers to bring disparate systems and processes together. With limited time for training and a diverse personnel skill set, the solution has to be simple to use, widely available, and customizable to each agency.
With the emergence of open standards and the Web, the developers of HA saw the opportunity to create an advanced information solution for home health agencies based on the same powerful productivity enhancing technologies afforded by Fortune 100 companies.
HA integrates computer telephony, voice recognition, relational databases, workflow automation, XML, and other technologies. To drive down costs for customers, the solution resides on a secured, hosted environment and is delivered using ubiquitous technologies—the telephone and the Web. The platform architecture is open and scalable. Customers have no additional hardware to buy or software to maintain. Migration issues with upgrades or enhancements are eliminated.
The Key: Applications Architecture
The software applications architecture employs a highly flexible business logic layer. This permits an agency to easily tailor HomeAdvantageTM to their particular business rules, practices, and definitions. The architecture and data capture schemes allows unparallel flexibility and accuracy in recording, tracking, and managing agency’s activities. The architecture is continually building libraries and extending its APIs to new front-end devices and enterprise systems.
The applications reside in a highly redundant and secure operational environment that is designed for high-availability. Customer information and transaction data are backed up daily, redundant databases ensure data permanence, UPS battery power supply all back-up systems, and rollover T-1 facilities standby in case of network failures. All web servers are fire-walled and use secure server technology for authentication and encryption.