Integrated Health Management Services Healthcare App Case Study

Healthcare Patient Screening & Eligibility Service Gains a Competitive Advantage and Speeds Employee Training with Healthcare App

Business Challenge

When IHMS first started their business in 1996 they employed a patient accounting system for small hospitals and over time the system became obsolete and could no longer support their business model. While the system handled hospital based government billing and follow-up well, it did not handle the Eligibility side of their business which continued to grow and despite IHMS’ attempts to modify the system it became clear that a change was needed. In reality, IHMS realized it had simply outgrown its legacy system and that a new one was needed and needed yesterday.

So began the search for a company and a healthcare app solution. IHMS wanted to build a comprehensive software solution that was both flexible and could keep up with technological changes and handle the ever-changing healthcare industry. IHMS needed a comprehensive solution and needed one fast. IHMS set aside a reasonable budget and began that search…

Solution

IHMS reached out to Alpha Software. The Alpha Anywhere rapid development and deployment platform represented a much better way to build a system – via a desktop and web application – that could manage all the organization’s needs, while maintaining a high level of security and meeting all HIPAA related compliance standards. Alpha Anywhere proved to be clearly superior to other healtchare app offerings available on the market, due to its low-code approach, which allowed for a faster ramp-up time and the availability of highly skilled Alpha Anywhere developers to build and update the application.

The Alpha Anywhere system tracks all IHMS accounts, allows for faster updates, and enables a wide range of reporting formats for IHMS’ clients. The system also triggers specific activities based on a set of conditions as they apply to an individual patient’s account and the work being performed. The new system, which requires less training time for new employees, also allows IHMS employees to easily work remotely, even when they’re on-site at hospitals interviewing patients at their bedside.

Here’s what the Principal & Chief Information Officer Larry Roberts, at IHMS had to say about AlphaAnywhere: “I could only imagine what a professional programmer could do with the Alpha platform. We really chose Alpha Anywhere because of the fact that it was a rapid development platform, that there was a lot of flexibility, and there is a large community of people around the world that were using the software so it has plenty of support.”

“The new system has definitely made us more efficient in general and reduced our training time significantly.”

“Our program RAMS™, the Referral and Account Management System, is a pretty advanced application built on the Alpha platform. It turned out that the platform could easily handle a complex application with many moving parts. The result has been pretty amazing, and it is web accessible, something that was not a possibility with our old application. It is extremely user friendly and that makes it a wonderful program for our folks.”

Results/Benefits

Making Changes Easy to Implement: “We're also able to make changes very quickly within the system. If we need to correct something we can make a very quick change. Basically, it manages almost all of the operational aspects of our business and is invaluable to our IT folks.” 

Making Remote Working Possible: “We have offices all over the western part of the U.S., and this new system makes it very easy for our folks to be able to work remotely, even when they’re interviewing patients at bedside in the hospital.” 

Reporting as a Competitive Advantage: “We have our amazing reporting capabilities because of Alpha Anywhere, and literally can create reports on the fly very quickly, making it a nice marketable tool for IHMS. Clients need customized reports and now we can deliver exactly what they want when they want it.” “We do a lot importing and exporting of data. Many of our clients require us to import and export data, so we have to set some criteria for that. We do all that through Alpha Anywhere and through SQL Server. The combination is extremely powerful.”