Visual WebGui Case Studies

"With Visual WebGui we were able to build an agile and secure web user interface that meets the requirements of our customer in terms of functionality and time-to-market Interface"

Overview
TYCON Software Engineering was founded in November 2005, and since then acquired market presence in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico in Industries of Health Care, Insurance, and Government. The company provides Enterprise Application Integration and Business Process Management with its own technologic platform (BIZUIT) that allows implementations of a brand new transactional business model. The company also provides consulting and development services in .NET platform with a team of technical and business people with large experience in the industry.

Solution’s Portfolio split in 2 big product’s families:

1. BIZUIT Technology Platform: Suite of Products that offers Business Process Management, Enterprise Application Integration and Application’s Visual Development, Information Management (Dashboards, KPIs, reports, graphics, statistics) and Document Management (Document’s digitalization, storage and search)
    
2. Transactional Business Platform: Suite of Web Applications based on BIZUIT that offers Sale’s automation over a virtual (e-commerce/shopping cart) or mixed channels, reducing sale’s cycle time and getting more control over distribution-chain, more stock-control on demand, Invoice automation and Digital Invoice Payment automation with several online payment methods.

The Telemedicine program was developed by the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (The National University of Cordoba) with the collaboration of Cordoba’s Ministry of Health and the Agencia Cordoba Ciencia (Cordoba Science Agency).

Business needs
The main objective of this program is to enhance the healthcare system for the province of Cordoba by leveraging information technologies and the Internet to assist remote locations with limited access to specialized medical expertise. Among other benefits, this program aims to speed up access to hard-to-reach medical experts and to reduce unnecessary patient derivations.

The previous solution provided a very basic second medical opinion network between doctors at remote sites (nodes) and specialists at hospitals in Cordoba city, utilizing email and mostly unstructured information. No records of patient cases are kept beyond what is saved on emails.
The goal of the new project was to support the telemedicine program by enhancing its technological base through a secure workflow-based solution for second medical opinion consultations utilizing structured as well as semi structured data, creating a historical database of cases. The new solution had to be implemented in a short period of time because of the time to market requirements of the customer.

The project provides access to these capabilities for ten (10) hospitals of Cordoba province. There are two (2) of these hospitals located in Cordoba City and the remaining eight (8) are located up to 350 Kilometers away from the city.

Technical Requirements
The project architecture should be divided in three parts:

• The Second Opinion Backbone,
• The Portal Network and
• The end users.

The Second Opinion Backbone is where all the business logic takes place. The backbone provides support for user management (i.e. LDAP user registry), persistence for consultation cases and a workflow engine for coordinating all the actors. The Portal Network sits in the middle tier and is logically separated from the backbone. It provides web access to the Second Opinion Backbone for users that only have access to an Internet-enabled computer. The architecture also envisions that larger institutions may already have a computing infrastructure that can be used to keep medical records.

Regarding the anonymity of the patients, it is required that no personal information ever enters the Second Opinion Backbone or the Portal. Similarly, all the communications going in and out of the backbone must be encrypted to protect confidentiality using WS-Security standards. For retrieval purposes, consultation cases should have a case identification that can be used by users to reopen or consult existing cases. Note that in the case of users accessing the backbone through the portal, they will not be able to do a query by name (since no personal information can be stored). Overall, the goal is to free the Second Opinion network provider (i.e. the Facultad de Medicina of UNC) from any responsibility regarding the leak of personal information.

Functional Requirements
The functionality of the Telemedicine Pilot system was delivered by the Second Opinion Module – Provides all the back-end functionality for capturing, maintaining and managing Second Opinion cases. It also provides a portal with a Web-based user interface which provides access to facilities without automated medical record systems. This module also provides a comprehensive Web Services interface to enable access from external systems.

The Second Opinion Module implements all the logic needed inside the Second Opinion Backbone as well as the user’s portal. This module takes care of functionality such as managing case data, executing and tracking second opinion workflows, sending notifications and providing an interface for users to access the Second Opinion Backbone. The second opinion requests follow a specified sequence of steps from its generation to its completion. All the required steps shall be managed by the Second Opinion Module functionalities.

In addition, this module should provide appropriate control points during the case life cycle. Since one of the main objectives of this module is to provide the physician working at remote hospitals with expert opinions on complex medical cases, it is required that the system provides streamlined workflows between all the involved actors i.e., remote physician, experts and workflow managers. A convenient mechanism of alarms must be provided to prevent problems and delays in the resolution of patient cases.

Some highlighted points regarding Second Opinion Module functionalities are:

• It should provide a user friendly interface
• User customization should be allowed as much as possible (e.g. user preferences, Quickbar settings, etc.)
• It should provide flexible ways for defining data items like entry forms and expert answer forms.

The Solution
TYCON's team looked for a solution that would allow to take the WinForms code generated by the BIZUIT BPM Platform and produce a web interface as an output. Since this process had to be implemented in less than 60 days the solution should also allow fast implementation of the project's requirements.

The team chose Visual WebGui as the core platform for the Web UI in their products because of the straightforward and cost-effective translation process from the custom WinForms code generated by their BIZUIT Platform to a fully AJAX enabled UI. As a result, Visual WebGui allowed TYCON to improve their platform in a very simple and cost-effective way.

"The overall implementation process was pretty simple, we just took our WinForms code generated by our BPM tool (BIZUIT) and changed a couple of namespaces and it just worked! A fully AJAX web application was developed" Said Ariel Schwindt CEO of Tycon S.A.

On top of that, the deployment process with Visual WebGui was also very simple. "We just modified our tool to publish the required assemblies in any virtual directory" Added Ariel.

Benefits
"With Visual WebGui we were able to build an agile and secure web user interface that meets the requirements of our customer in terms of functionality and time-to-market Interface"

Using Visual WebGui allowed Tycon to deliver the new solution faster than expected saving time and resources due to the easy and quick implementation process of the existing WinForms code. The original plan to convert the WinForms generated code to web was a 5 month/man effort. With Visual WebGui TYCON completed the job using only 1 developer for 1 month.

In addition, Visual WebGui presents strong inherited security which is extremely important since the Second Opinion application deals with patients' confidential information. Due to the Visual WebGui unique approach that confidential information remains protect when it is transferred over the web.

Visual WebGui also allowed the creation of beautiful, rich AJAX Interfaces that are user friendly and extremely responsive over the web.

Screen shots
In the following form, a physician provides all the necessary data in order to create a new “Second Opinion Case” (ticket).

Once all the data is entered, the physician may add documents to the ticket. These documents can be diagnostic imaging, results of studies or other information that expand on the information of the ticket. For this, the physician should select the Add Documents button which displays the following information.

When it is the time for a specialist to give an answer to that ticket that was assigned for him, he selects the Resolution tab, which will let record the following information shown below: 

The printing of tickets for a Second Opinion Workflow can be done at any time in the life cycle of a ticket when the user who is operating, has enough permission.
After opening a ticket to print, the Print button will displays a preview of the ticket as shown below: