Our client provides comprehensive billing and accounts receivable management services to anesthesiologists across the USA. This is a highly specialized field in which they had to deal with constantly changing regulations and other factors that are unique to this profession.

 

Initial situation:

 

An old FoxPro application is used to manage quite complex business processes in offices on two continents, with the total number of client workstations exceeding 100. The only viable solution for combining requests for the flexible remote work functionality and such ancient technology was to use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Although this solution was a short term success, it was causing a lot of headaches for the system administrators due to its inherent instability - not to mention various design flaws and non-existing features that were almost impossible to add.

 

System description:

 

Anesthesia Billing is a smart client application that combines the best features of both Web applications (small footprint, easy automated installation, easy maintenance) and "fat" clients/desktop apps (rich user interface, offline functionality, performance, higher developer and user productivity). Our client has already made unsuccessful attempts to implement the billing system as a "classic" Web applications - all of them failed due to the performance and user interface issues. To put it simply, no Ajax or other technology will enable data entry person to enter hundreds of demographic/charge/payment records every day. The thin client (Web) application model is no longer able to provide the required levels of functionality, performance and flexibility. Users are demanding fast and responsive applications to perform their daily work in a flexible and efficient manner.

 

This is where new smart client technology steps in. Apart from the benefits described above, smart clients provide much more flexibility than the traditional rich client applications. They are not designed as "old fashioned", monolithic desktop applications. Smart client solutions can be composed of functionality from more than one client application, with each application collaborating with the others to provide just the right functionality to the user.

 

In one sentence, Anesthesia Billing is an application that uses local processing, consumes XML Web Services and can be deployed and updated from a centralized server. It can readily integrate with the emerging technologies ("Indigo" or "WSF"), and it heavily utilizes best practices like background threads and Object-Relational Mapping. This effectively minimizes the amount of data that is transferred over the Internet, maximizes security, and enables users to work comfortably: for example, a new data entry module can be opened in a new tab (the application uses the familiar, Visual Studio-like GUI) immediately while the application saves the object graph from the "old" module. There are virtually NO delays in user interaction.

 

 

Anesthesia Billing includes the following main modules:

• patient demographics
• charge entry
• HCFA / EDI processing (with support for 837/835 standards)
• payment processing
• follow-up
• lookup data administration and configuration
• lookup synchronization
• reports
• import/conversion
• separate Web-based business intelligence/report portal that is available to the "external" users 

Technical details:

 

Anesthesia Billing application is based on the Mono Smart Client Framework. It is developed using the Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 and related development tools (VS.NET 2005 + C#), and is running on MS Windows 2003 server and SQL Server 2005.

 

Contact us for more info: info@mono-software.com.