Customer Profile
APS Healthcare Inc.
(http://www.apshealthcare.com)

Our Solution
The system has an administrator and corporate user interface. The administrator is responsible for carrying out routine administrative site activities.

The corporate user is the end user, who is interested in the system functionality and its search features. He should be a member of any corporate registered with APS Healthcare Inc. He will be accessing the services by using a secure web interface,

Tools and Technologies

• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.
• Development Tool: Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0.
• Visual InterDev for Active Server Pages and Ultradev for cross browser compatibility testing
• Visual Basic for developing COM components.
• Hardware.
• Server system: Compaq Proliant 1850, dual 600 Mhz Pentium, 1 GB RAM
• MS SQL Server 7.0

Methodology
The system is designed and developed using the Iterative Methodology incorporating aspects of the Microsoft Solution Framework in it. The idea was to show incremental functionality to the client and obtain feedback to ensure that the system was evolving to their requirements.

Benefits
APS Healthcare, Inc is dedicated to providing user-friendly, accessible, comprehensive, integrated and innovative healthcare solutions to customers, beneficiaries, and providers. Services like Find a Clinician offered by APS increase employee / member / provider satisfaction, improve employee productivity, boost employee retention, enhance safety in the workplace and contain healthcare costs for the member companies of APS Healthcare.

Introduction
Find a Clinician is an internet-based service being offered by the client. This allows the client to capitalize on the rich database of information it has built up on clinical providers and allow it to offers its customers an easy and user-friendly way to access this information. The system consists of browser based user interfaces that invoke server side programs that in turn communicate with the database to produce search results based on the submitted query. Users can search for providers based on a variety of search criteria like city, state, county, name, spESNalty etc. Once the results are displayed, the user can select a specific provider and get a map and driving directions to the provider. The users can also nominate new providers to APS.

Situation
APS Healthcare Inc. plans to expand their online services to their clients by offering online search facility to their large provider panel using Internet technologies. The APS Online Clinician Locator System is a corporate service being offered to all employees of its clients to identify suitable providers.

Features
The corporate user has the following functionality:

• Logging via web interface using Access code.
• Run a Search based on the various data facts of the clinician.
• View the results matching the criteria consisting of Active Providers, Providers being Credentialed and Inactive providers.
• Choose a Provider from the results and View the Provider location in a map and also get detailed driving directions from his location to the provider location.
  

The administrator has the following functionality:

• Maintenance and Search of
  • Contracts information.
  • Providers information
  • Provider networks information
  • Provider areas of interest information
• Import provider data which is obtained from their databases into the system
• Provider spESNalty linkage
• Usage tracking
• Maintaining User feedback

We were involved in the database design for the system and also understanding the domain specific knowledge related to the system prior to implementation. These were documented and exchanged for comments and feedback with the client.

Compatibility across browsers was an important issue. We had to use code and tools that would ensure that the system works uniformly well under both Internet Explorer and Netscape.