4 Steps to Building a Healthcare Business Case for Application Modernization

IPC Healthcare (now a part of TeamHealth) supplies physician services to hospitals and nursing homes. It also provides services for assisted living, emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and pediatrics. The Director of Operations for acute care knew that they needed a better way to track patients. They had a legacy system, but it needed to be updated with new features. They were also expanding in other regions and the legacy app was not scalable to support multiple regions.

SharpQuest team helped the company rebuild a web based patient tracking application using modern tools and hosted in their secure on-premise facility. The application was scalable to support multiple regions and that allowed the company to expand and easily provide services in other regions using the new application.

#1 – Prove that Off-The-Shelf Didn’t Meet Requirements

Before the Director of Operations could get internal support and funding for the project, they needed to first do the research and prove that nothing on the market met their needs. There are many patient tracking systems available, but none that could work agnostically across the many different care coordinators that IPC Healthcare worked with. In fact, the only way to do it was using an Excel spreadsheet that was shared with everyone involved. This option was cheap, but did not meet the security and HIPAA compliance requirements to be a realistic solution.

#2 – Calculate the Value of Automation

A big part of making a business case for custom software development is to work through the expected outcomes and how it will change business processes for the better. The Director of Operations realized that just improving the performance of their legacy software wasn’t enough. There was an opportunity to add functionality like reporting and appointment setting. The Director went to the various managers in these areas and got the steps and the time estimates for how long it took to manually book appointments as well as how long it took to pull a patient’s record.

This is an incredibly valuable exercise as it makes the business process visible to developers to evaluate what can be automated, thereby helping in design for the software development. This information can then also be used for the internal business case to calculate out the time savings and the corresponding cost savings that can be realized with the investment in the application modernization project.

In the case of IPC Healthcare, they also surveyed the field on the performance issues of the legacy system and how much time they were wasting due to this. Altogether, the potential for resource efficiency made a very strong case for application modernization.

#3 – Take Small Steps with Big Impact

Just getting approval to move forward with application modernization isn’t enough. It is important with any project like this that the champion show improvements continually, versus waiting for a big bang at the end. Taking on small, yet high-impact projects in agile sprints is a great way to provide feedback internally to demonstrate that the project is beginning to show benefits. In the case of IPC Healthcare, the custom development partner - SharpQuest - was able to quickly fix the performance of the existing system, then began to add on modules/features one-by-one. The Director of Operations continued to have internal wins throughout the project that kept everyone happy with the application modernization effort.

#4 – Celebrate the Big ROI from Application Modernization

IPC Healthcare has no regrets about their application modernization project. Here are some of the outcomes they experienced:

- 100% accessibility and no performance issues

- Priceless access to data reporting that is making a big impact on the business

- Now able to market timely services to patients, which is bringing in more revenue

- More accurate data is improving billing, which has also increased revenue

- Significantly improved productivity of care coordinators and clinicians thanks to automated workflows

- Improved patient care with easier access to patient data

IPC Healthcare is definitely celebrating these wins. But with any investment project like application modernization, it is important to go back and show the return on that investment. This makes continuing to improve the application and creating new modules an easier ask.

To get quotes and more details on this project, you can read the full IPC Healthcare story here.