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Case Study - Health IT
Global CI has played a significant role in the design, development, implementation and ongoing maintenance of a number of large, complex Health IT systems for the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid under multiple contract vehicles since 1993. Samples of GCI’s services are listed below.
Our work has resulted in Global CI receiving numerous federal government awards and citations including: Two Hammer awards (issued by the President’s National Performance Review Committee), four Commissioner Citations, six Associate Commissioner Citations and many certificates of appreciation.
Health Information Technology
- Agency Technical Lead for Health IT Initiatives
- Federal Health Architecture Technical Lead
- Project Management (Strategic & Tactical Planning, ITAB Resource Planning, Budget Plan Development, Project/Task Planning and Management)
- Business Analysis (Value Proposition, Cost Benefit Analysis, Use Case and Requirements Development, Capacity and Performance Planning, OMB Health IT Scorecard Tracking)
- Business Development and Relationship Management with outside entities (Federal Agencies, Healthcare Providers, Advocacy Groups, Health IT Software Vendors, Employers)
- Technical Lead for Health IT Standards on ANSI, ASTM and HL7 workgroups
- Agency Representative for HITSP (Health IT Standards Panel) committees (EHR, Consumer Empowerment, Foundations and Security/Privacy)
- Agency Representative for Federal Health IT Policy Council
- Work Order Manager for the Health Information Technology Initiatives
Electronic Disability Claims Processing Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis
- Work Order Manager Lead for Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis
- Responsible verification and validation of the Load Intensity Tables
- Managed Performance Analysis efforts relating to CPU, DASD and Network resources for both Sun and z/OS
- Managed performance testing efforts using LoadRunner to support Document Management Architecture clients
Electronic Medical Evidence Background
- Technical Lead and Work Order Manager for Electronic Medical Evidence project
- Project Management (Strategic & Tactical Planning, Project/Task Planning and Management, Capacity Planning)
- Requirements Management (Co-lead on EME User Needs Analysis with Systems, DDS and legacy vendors)
- System Architecture and Design for EME Web Site
- Document Imaging Domain Expert
- Software Development (Gentran Integration Suite, Connect:Direct, Java, VBScript, MySQL, Solaris) for EME Web Site
- Full Lifecycle Support for EME Management Information Reporting system
- Enterprise Support of EME for DDS, OHA and external providers. Developed EME Training program for Help Desk.
- Developed and managed site rollout plan for the Outsource Scan Vendor contract (Panacea)
- Responsible for the Full Lifecycle Development (requirements, design, architecture, development, test, deployment, documentation) of the EME Print Facility (NT Service)
- Developed deployment plan and scripts for national DDS and OHA rollout of EME Print Facility (NT Service) to all MMS (Managed Member Servers)
- Responsible for the Full Lifecycle Development (requirements, design, architecture, development, test, deployment, documentation) of the EME TIF Conversion system
- Managed initial rollout of Bulk Providers (Smart Document Solutions and ChartOne)
- Development and Deployment of EME Training
- Relationship Building to increase EME volume with Disability Determination Services, Healthcare Providers, Health IT Software Vendors
- Lead technical presenter for the National Professional Relationship Conference (2005)
- Development of two workshops for the National Electronic Records Conference (2006)
- Technical Lead for the initial requirements gathering and system architecture for the EME Web Services
- Case Processing and Management System, Electronic Case Analysis Tool and Processing System
- Lead Architect (OOA/OOP/OOD, J2EE, Sun/Solaris, Websphere, z/OS, Hibernate, MQ, Struts, XML)
- Full Life Cycle support
Electronic Representative Payee Accounting and Electronic Forms
- Architectural Planning & Design
Ongoing Production Support
- Primary responsibility for 24x7 production support of the Social Security Administration’s Document Management Architecture data warehouse. This consists of over 30TB of DB2 data and over 100 million documents related to disability, Medicare and related systems implemented on a data-sharing environment on Z/OS. Many of the tables consist of hundreds of millions of records and 250 partitions. This is one of the largest Content Manager DB2 databases in the world.
Enterprise Infrastructure Management and Support
- Planning and executing recovery efforts
- Production support problem resolution
- Provide support at daily CMS production calls
- Develop and maintain detailed production processes and procedures
- Global CI provides support related to regular performance monitoring and tuning using tools such as Omegamon, Platinum and Quest as well as native DB2 SMF and RMF data. Performs regular backup and recovery procedures as necessary, fixing and re-running of batch processes in case of errors, reorganization, runstats maintenance and schema changes. The Global CI DBA team designed the local backup and recovery procedures and participated in designing the disaster recovery procedures involving shadow copy of DASD volumes and DB2 Log Suspend option for Document Management Architecture databases.
- The DBAs provide production support and receive support calls on a 24x7 basis. VPN access to the production mainframe systems is available to provide expeditious support from remote locations, late hours or weekends. The production batch jobs schedules are automated using the Control-M software. The batch jobs have been implemented such that any failures in the batch jobs result in the on-call DBA personnel receiving an automatic pager warning with a brief description of the error. Certain restartable jobs have been implemented in the scheduling system to be automatically resubmitted a set number of times. If these jobs are not successful after the set number of retries then the DBA team carries out manual intervention to resolve the issues. The issues encountered during a batch cycle are reported to SSA management staff in production calls as necessary. All production processes are well documented as per the SSA standards as well as individual job dependencies and restart procedures are available to the production support staff to aid in the efficient operation of the batch schedule.
Production Operations Support
· Online and batch processing support,
· Rsolution of technical defects,
- Provide documented escalation procedures to ensure that data center personnel can contact appropriate Contractor production support personnel,
- Provide 24 hour application support 7 days a week throughout the year,
- Follow all CMS standards and processes.
- Global CI provides 24x7 application support to a large number of complex online and batch applications that use a wide variety of software tools and products. Some of the software used includes mainframe software such as COBOL, CICS, DB2, MQ Series, Websphere, Content Manager running on Z/OS platform. Websphere Application Servers, Java, J2EE, Content Manager, DB2 UDB, Oracle, SQL Server running on SUN Solaris and Windows platforms.
- Many of these applications support critical business processes that are very high volume transaction processing (OLTP) and analytical processing (OLAP) environments. The DMA application that stores documents electronically handles over 30 million Websphere transactions per day with sub-second response times. The Websphere Application Servers run on the SUN Solaris servers and the database runs on the DB2 data-sharing environment on Z/OS.
Requirements Engineering
- Global CI was the lead designer/architect and prepared Design and Architectural documents for a Case Processing and Management System, Electronic Case Analysis Tool and Expert Processing System.
- Global CI was involved with a number of Logical Data Model design and requirements gathering efforts related to multiple projects that resulted in creation of new systems or enhancement of existing systems. This involved design sessions with users, business analysts, systems analysts and database administrators. The data model requirements gathered from these sessions are used to create the logical data model using CA Allfusion Erwin data modeling toolset. Appropriate referential integrity relationships are added to the model to enforce data integrity. Normalization of the entities are carried out where appropriate. All attributes of the model are checked using a naming standards macro process which generates physical attribute names that follow the SSA naming standards. A subsequent meeting with the naming standards committee is held to provide final approval to the logical and physical attribute names.
- As the business requirements change the corresponding data model is changed to support the new requirements. The logical data model and physical database are kept in sync at all times. A recent project required the creation of a new logical data model from user requirements. All the tasks related to gathering requirements, creating logical, physical model, implementation in development, testing, acceptance, training and production was completed. The model consisting of over 80 entities and corresponding relationships, keys and indexes was implemented using CA Allfusion Erwin toolset in less than six months.
- All Logical and Physical Data Models created by Global CI staff uses the SSA Master Data dictionary which adheres to the SSA Data Administration standards and contain correct naming conventions, data names, data definitions and valid values. Any discrepancies between a newly created entity or attribute and the data model are resolved by a naming standards committee prior to approval of the data model. The committee either requires change to the new attributes or enhances the data dictionary to accommodate the new requirement.
Design & Engineering
- Global CI was the lead designer/architect and prepared Design and Architectural documents for Case Processing and Management System. CPMS is a J2EE application deployed initially in a Sun/Solaris environment. The application server is Websphere 5.x. The application has since be redeployed to a z/OS environment. The application serves over 4,000 users.
- This application uses a custom web application framework written by Global CI designed for SSA Intranet applications. This framework implements dispatching, navigation, security, threading utilities, logging, and general support exception handling. This framework is running overtop of both CPMS and CHIP (Customer Help and Information Program) serving over 8,000 Intranet users.
- There is also a messaging subsystem embedded within CPMS. This is a multi-threaded subsystem that is configured by an XML file. The system can be re-configured (more/less threads, new queues, temporarily stop a queue etc) without stopping the application server. The messaging service is WebSphere MQ and the current concrete implementation classes are against the Java MQ API.
- Global CI staff was the Lead Architect for the Electronic Case Analysis Tool and Expert Processing System. Both systems are J2EE WebSphere applications deployed in the SSA z/OS environment. The applications use Struts for front end processing and Hibernate for object/relational mapping and SQL generation. Both are backed by DB2 databases. The applications share a common framework project, which was derived from the in-house written web application framework. Additional components to support Struts and Hibernate were added to the new framework.
- Global CI was the Architectural Consultant Electronic Representative Payee Accounting. Global CI conducted architectural design sessions with project managers and lead developers. Team decided to implement the project using Struts, Hibernate and the supporting version of the web application framework.
- Global CI Consulted for high-level architectural issues relating to J2EE server topology for the Electronic Forms application.
- Global CI designs and supports Physical Data Model - After the logical data model has been approved the physical data model is generated using the CA Allfusion Erwin toolset. The physical data model forms the basis for the generation of the DDL for implementation of the database on the DB2 environment on Z/OS platform. During the initial creation of the database the DDL is generated by CA Allfusion and used to create the database. Any subsequent modification to the physical data model such as add or drop of tables, indexes, relationships, attributes is implementation on the database by running a comparison between the definitions in CA Allfusion and the DB2 database. The comparison is used to generate the DDL changes which are then implemented on the physical database. Platinum RC/Compare and RC/Migrate are also used to aid the implementation of database schema changes. The Global CI database team possesses expert knowledge of many areas of the data models used at SSA.
Testing
- Global CI supports the performance and stress testing of mission critical high-volume transaction systems that currently run in production with over 30million transactions per day providing sub-second response times running on DB2 for Z/OS environment. The performance tests were automated using the Mercury Loadrunner set of test automation toolset. These tools improved the efficiency, accuracy and ease of running the performance tests as well as provided a simulated productions environment with hundreds of active users. Performance reports generated from these tools as well as native DB2 SMF reports were used to tune the SQLs and application logic in an iterative manner to achieve optimum performance.
Support
- As part of the ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the database environment and procedures, Global CI implemented a system for continuous monitoring of errors, exceptions and warning thresholds for all DB2 databases in production. This involved comprehensive data analysis, problem identification and resolution. On a weekly basis all database objects are analyzed for such exceptions as under allocation or over allocation of space, excessive extents, invalid statistics update, lack of adequate backup copies, need for data reorganization, invalid packages and other warnings and threshold conditions. Upon flagging of any database object as requiring maintenance related to the exception condition, the corresponding database administrator or owner of the database is notified via an automated email warning message specifying the type of warning or exception that had been flagged by the exception check process. This alerts the database administrator to take the necessary steps to rectify the problem. Due to the proactive checking of all the databases and identifying potential problems before they can actually occur, the incidence of database problems have been reduced significantly enterprise wide.
Document Management Architecture and System Deployment
- Global CI staff designed and built a document management prototype to initially focus on capturing and providing electronic access to disability claims files. It was successful and launched a new project for Global CI; the implementation of this system to each region and every state and territory for the USA and call desk support. It is currently deployed and Global CI is part of the maintenance and support team.
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Global CI has provided solutions and/or staff augmentation to help our clients solve significant IT challenges in a timely manner often under budgetary constraints.
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