HKS OTTR Web Portal

Overview

Exigence implemented a web-based, HIPAA-compliant front-end to the HKS OTTR patient information management system.

Note

This project included both of Exigence’s co-founders as project co-leads, but took place before Exigence was incorporated.

Context

HKS provides its OTTR (Organ Transplant Tracking Record) software to over 30 transplant centers, serving over 180,000 patients around the world.

OTTR works well in hospitals as it uses:

However, HKS needed a web solution to complement their traditional desktop-based approach as:

HKS attempted to develop a web solution in-house, but had minimal success as their programmers were:

Solution

HKS turned to Exigence to jump-start their web solution due to:

Exigence put together a team of 4 developers, 1 designer and over a 3-month period spearheaded several managerial and technical issues.

Agile Approach

Given the short time frame, Exigence proposed it would be more efficient to develop the requirements as the project progressed rather than take a large chunk of time up-front.

Weekly demo meetings were held with project stakeholders to gather feedback on features, allowing very quick feedback and turnaround to feature requests and changes as HKS got to see exactly what they were getting within 2 weeks of project start.

J2EE-based Solution

Exigence determined the popular technology at the time, EJBs, involved too much unneeded overhead, but that the standards of a basic J2EE founded provided a good long-term solution.

Exigence also re-used many existing open source infrastructure components to save HKS time and money implementing them on their own (for example, Exigence selected Hibernate as an off-the-shelf data layer, where as HKS’s Objective C desktop client had a custom data layer with 20,000+ lines of code).

HIPAA-compliance

Exigence used state-of-the-art Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) technology to ensure that anytime patient information was used on a page, the current user of the web application had explicit permission to view that patient’s data.

Complex database schema

The OTTR database schema has evolved during 10+ years of active use to serve many different needs.

Exigence successfully learned the pertinent aspects of the schema and used a data layer to hide many of the schema and vendor-specific SQL complexities.

Results

After 3 months, Exigence successfully delivered a solution that provided read-only access to both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle OTTR installations.

HKS was very pleased with the end-to-end functionality demonstrated by the Exigence prototyping effort and moved to make it part of their long-term portfolio by:

Statistics

Take Aways

We work well on new technology projects, introducing new technology and methodology best-practices into existing IT environments