Developers Enjoy Higher Productivity, Rapid Implementation ...



Overview

Country: United States

Industry: Healthcare

Customer Profile

High-ranking University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) ensures that its patients receive the highest standard of coordinated healthcare by pioneering advances in its e-Health initiatives.

Business Situation

With self-managed healthcare becoming increasingly common, UPMC doctors and staff wanted a way to improve communication and increase patient ownership without sacrificing the quality of care.

Solution

By using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 and Microsoft 2.0, UPMC developed a portal that enables patients and doctors to easily collaborate on self-managed healthcare devices

Benefits

■ Faster time-to-market

■ Increased developer productivity

■ Impressive site performance

■ Enhanced user experience

| | |“We went from five- or six-month release cycles, working in another development system, to three months to develop comparable projects with Microsoft .NET.”

William Freker, Lead Solutions Architect/Manager, UPMC

| |

| | | |With the boom in health and fitness, people have begun to take a more active role in taking care of |

| | | |their own health. It’s a trend valued at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), one of |

| | | |the most respected medical centers in the United States. As part of UPMC’s e-Health initiatives, the |

| | | |hospital launched HealthTrak, a portal that enables patients and doctors to collaborate on |

| | | |self-managed healthcare services. A small team of developers working with Microsoft® Services |

| | | |consultants used the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system and Microsoft 2.0 to |

| | | |develop the first release of HealthTrak in only three months. UPMC took advantage of built-in tools |

| | | |and capabilities that enabled easier testing, rapid implementation, and improved developer |

| | | |productivity. Now the site meets high performance demands and serves patients’ and physicians’ needs |

| | | |seamlessly. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

|Development Facts |

|Number of developers |2.5 |

|Key technologies |Visual Studio |

| |2005, Enterprise |

| |Library 1.1 |

| | 2.0 |

| |SQL Server 2000 |

| |Enterprise Edition|

|Programming language |Visual C# |

|Reduction in |50 percent |

|time-to-market, compared | |

|with development in | |

|another environment | |

|Time to develop |3 months |

|Number of pages used |12 |

|Number of |13 |

|binaries/assemblies used | |

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is one of the top-ranked hospitals in the United States and often places in U.S News & World Report magazine’s list of America’s Best Hospitals. UPMC is the only Pittsburgh hospital to achieve this distinction, and offers a wide range of auxiliary services to ensure that patients and their families receive the highest standard of coordinated care.

With visits to the doctor becoming increasingly expensive and medical professionals being increasingly hard-pressed for time, both patients and doctors want not only to find a way to improve doctor-patient interactions and provide up-to-date information on status and progress without sacrificing quality of care, but also to enable patients to more easily take control of their own care.

UPMC had many third-party health information systems, but if a patient’s primary care physician used one system, that patient did not necessarily have seamless access or single sign-in if the patient needed to access a system used by another physician. UPMC realized the need for a unified solution whereby patients could take more control of their healthcare with online resources and support. The hospital wanted to build a system with better accessibility and a wider reach.

Solution

UPMC developers used to work in another development environment. The team began by designing and developing a portal to assist people with managing their diabetes. Soon, however, the portal took on a broader reach and became HealthTrak, UPMC’s single point of entry for patient-managed healthcare.

A small team of developers used Microsoft® 2.0, a set of technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework for building Web applications and Web services. Working with the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system, the team created HealthTrak, an extranet portal that gives patients the resources and information to manage their own health. By using HealthTrak, patients can schedule appointments with care providers, view their records, calculate their body mass index, and track blood pressure, blood sugar, and activity. An example of one HealthTrak tool is shown in Figure 1.

HealthTrak provides a front-end to existing clinical systems. Now UPMC patients can access their personal health record information regardless of which back-end system their primary care provider uses.

An important player in the development process was Microsoft Services, which helps Microsoft customers test and deploy Microsoft products and applications. As part of UPMC’s participation in an early adoption program, Microsoft Services collaborated with the UPMC team for the design and architecture of the solution. Microsoft Services also coordinated the integration efforts with the back-end Personal Health Record (PHR) vendor systems, and helped with troubleshooting.

“The Microsoft Services team did an amazing job helping us design and architect an elegant and effective solution quickly—one that we were able to implement rapidly,” remarks William (Bill) Freker, Lead Solutions Architect/Manager at UPMC.

Features of 2.0 that the team found particularly useful included Master Pages, Data Binding, Themes, and Callbacks. In addition, built-in membership, testing, and security features in 2.0 saved the UPMC development team time, so they could concentrate on application functionality. To help users navigate easily through the site, the team used site mapping navigation controls, new in 2.0.

Master Pages

Master Pages are a new feature in 2.0, and help organizations reduce Web application development time by defining a single location to maintain a consistent look and feel in a Web site. By using Master Pages, developers were able to design a template that can be used to generate a common layout for many other pages in the application. In addition, Master Pages provided the team with better flexibility because pages can contain any HTML or other control that can be found on an page.

Data Binding

Data binding gives developers the ability to bind a data structure directly to a user interface control, specifically, the data set. 2.0 provides the extended capability to bind the data directly to an object. Direct data binding eliminates the need to first bind the object to something and then to the controls, saving time and increasing programmer productivity.

James Schaffer, Microsoft Services Senior Consultant, gives one example, “The ability to bind controls and pages directly to middle-tier components really helped speed up development.”

Themes

UPMC IT staff develops sites for multiple UPMC customers and, therefore, needs to maintain a consistent look and feel across sites. Themes enhance the quality of the user interface and make it consistent across the entire site.

Says Freker, “The use of Themes made it easier to replicate a look and feel across one site or several, as required. Themes also simplified file management. We could create themes, put them in a common place in [Microsoft] Visual SourceSafe® and share them across all our projects.”

Script Callbacks

Script Callbacks is a feature that “calls back” or retrieves certain information based on a key value. In HealthTrak, developers used the callback feature to populate fields in a registration form, without requiring the application to perform a full-page refresh. A HealthTrak registrar can look up patient information based on the patient’s social security number. Using script callbacks, the application passes the social security number to a Web service that performs the look-up. The same Web service passes back any data found for that patient.

|“The Microsoft Services team did an amazing job |

|helping us design and architect an elegant and |

|effective solution quickly—one that we were able |

|to implement rapidly.” |

|William (Bill) Freker, Lead Solutions |

|Architect/Manager, UPMC |

Benefits

UPMC’s developers have benefited substantially from the Visual Studio 2005 development system and 2.0. UPMC reduced code written and gained from built-in tools and capabilities that enabled easier testing, rapid implementation, and improved developer productivity. The result was a site that performs well and serves patients’ and physicians’ needs.

Faster Time-to-Market

Development of the HealthTrak site was both speedy and cost-effective for UPMC. In fact, in only one week’s time, the team was up-to-speed on 2.0 and had built a fully functional database application.

“Microsoft .NET, Visual Studio, and specifically 2.0 significantly reduce development cycles,” remarks Freker. “We went from five- or six-month release cycles, working in another development environment, to three months to develop comparable projects with Microsoft .NET,” says Freker.

New features, such as Master Pages and Themes in 2.0 saved developers time and increased their productivity. In addition, with a need to develop sites for multiple customers, the team found that Themes improved the end product and helped with administration. With Themes, developers don’t have to repeatedly develop Themes, or to manage files or libraries for each individual site. In 2.0, a single Theme can be used multiple times across single or several sites.

Increased Developer Productivity

Another noteworthy improvement has been the dramatic increase in productivity of developers working with 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

Freker explains, “Data Binding alone has tremendous initial and long-term value. With it, we write fewer lines of code and save time on initial development. That means fewer errors and less testing and, long-term, less code to maintain.”

At the start of the project, Rick Myer, now Lead Developer at UPMC, used to develop in another environment. But he quickly picked up the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool; which has been designed for building enterprise applications that run on the .NET Framework. After only three months’ time, Myer is already designing and developing most pieces of the application in conjunction with Schaffer.

“One of my complaints with the development environment that I used to work in is that it’s very confusing to know where to find everything with all the different tools,” remarks Myer. “Even the naming conventions are not consistent.” Myer likes working with the Visual C# language and the Microsoft .NET Framework. “With [Visual] C# and Microsoft .NET it’s easier to understand where all the pieces go with each other. I really like the built-in unit-testing functionality of Visual Studio; it’s much better than what’s available in other environments.”

Productivity-enhancing features of Visual Studio 2005 extend beyond development to testing and deployment. Freker remarks, “UPMC is benefiting from the integrated development environment and the extra set of tools that comes with Visual Studio 2005, such as built-in unit testing and load testing to do much more automated build and deployment processing. These features help us ensure better quality assurance and make deployment much easier.”

Impressive Site Performance, Enhanced User Experience

The Web site has lived up to the expectations of UPMC development staff, physicians, and patients in its performance and features.

Says Freker, “Although we’re primarily a [Microsoft] SQL Server shop; we have some Oracle in the infrastructure. The performance of 2.0 with SQL Server blows away that of another development environment and Oracle. Native drivers within the .NET Framework for SQL Server make all the difference.”

Since launch, UPMC has received great feedback from its users, who have commented on the excellent site performance.

Says Freker, “Feedback from the HealthTrak site has been positive. Patients and physicians, alike, rave about the ability to communicate readily and easily. Patients really appreciate improved access to their physicians and the ability to take control of their own healthcare.”

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information on Visual Studio 2005, go to:

msdn.vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio:

msdn.vstudio/howtobuy

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| |Software and Services

Microsoft Windows Server System™

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■ Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

■ Technologies

− Microsoft 2.0

− Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 |Partners

■ Microsoft Services

| | | | | | |

Figure 1. HealthTrak contains easy-to-use tools that allow patients to monitor their personal health record information.

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, MSDN, Visual C#, Visual SourceSafe, Visual Studio, the Visual Studio logo, Windows, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Document published October 2005 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about University of Pittsburg Medical Center products and services, call 1-800-533-UPMC (8762) or visit the Web site at:



[pic]

“The performance of 2.0 Beta with SQL Server blows away that of another development environment and Oracle. “

William (Bill) Freker, Lead Solutions Architect/Manager, UPMC | |

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