A Leading Healthcare Company Resolves Technical Debt With Trigent’s Application Maintenance Services - Enhances CX for 300K Clinicians

Trigent's domain expertise in application maintenance has evolved every aspect of our application.

About the client

Our client is a well-known provider of medical imaging software and services for the healthcare industry. Headquartered in Canada and the United States, the organization has over 800 employees across five different time zones. The organization’s scalable medical imaging platform connects clinicians to a powerful imaging ecosystem that is fast, smart, and taps into the data that clinicians need remotely. Nearly 300,000 clinicians depend on the client’s platform to manage patient data, helping them reduce time and workload.

Business needs

Improving healthcare service delivery through innovative technology is a priority for the organization. This required the core engineering team to maximize their time spent on new product development. Steps to trace a code of older applications, identify root causes for recurring issues, and replace the outdated code were deferred, which resulted in periodic service disruption and in accrued technical debt. To enable the product engineering team to focus on new strategic initiatives, they sought to build an independent and standardized framework for application maintenance to manage business-critical applications and ensure zero downtime.

Business challenge

The agency’s operations ran on several legacy applications, built on a custom platform, and updated over the past 20 years. With no historical knowledge base, database, or code documentation available and most technology stack retired, the organization sought a team of seasoned experts to help them with specialized skill set and product know-how to analyze the undocumented code, identify technical debt and improve upon them, thereby ensuring non-disruptive operations for contemporary customer experience.

Further, to safeguard its earlier technological investments while continuing to provide superior customer experience, the organization desired a team of experts who would

• Maintain sustainability to the legacy technology stack
• Make the applications user-friendly with modern technology
• Cleanse code and data in the legacy systems for better utilization

Trigent solution

Implementation of a systematic approach to Application Maintenance

To ensure the uninterrupted functioning of the engineering team for continuous improvement and 24/7 availability of its existing applications, the organization partnered with Trigent to establish a robust Application Maintenance program for its existing legacy systems. Trigent’s team of seasoned experts managed the entire life cycle of application maintenance and support by adopting a systematic and collaborative approach. As part of a strategic communication process, solution discussion forums were built, wherein a series of discussions with regard to product backlog refinement was done.

Continuous improvement of legacy technology stack with relevant talent pool

The ad-hoc architecture evolution of the current system resulted in a significant technical debt being accumulated over time. The organizational software for several specialties such as OB/GYN, Cardiology, and Radiology specialties ran on several loosely interconnected legacy systems like VB6.0, C++, and MS SQL server, to name a few.

Trigent's domain experience and technical expertise in application maintenance and support enabled the organization to maintain the legacy applications with modern approaches. The team progressively and iteratively captured knowledge regarding various application modules. Due to a lack of adequate historical data, the team progressively analyzed modules and studied the codes related to the applications, reverse engineered them, and by applying several industry best practices such as DRY (don't repeat yourself), identified and filled the existing gaps in the existing architecture. In addition, the team managed several DICOM files built on legacy desktop applications. Leveraging LEADTOOLS, the team built customized connectors to the existing DICOM applications to enhance DICOM viewers.

Jira was leveraged for the overall management of the application, such as error tracking, and debugging, to name a few.

Sustaining the legacy technology stack by identifying the technical debt

In addition to the regular optimization of the application, the team took proactive measures to address the accumulated technical debt in the system accrued over the last two decades. To manage the business-critical legacy application with zero downtime, the team identified pockets wherein continuous improvement was possible in an agile manner. The team migrated the INI files to SQL server configuration and developed several utility tools to enhance the organization’s customer onboarding process and reduce its overall cycle time.

Enabling a Modern CX for Healthcare professionals with zero re-training

One of the business requirements was to minimize or avoid having the 300,000 clinicians undergo training on new technological revisions that would be time-consuming, capital intensive, and disrupt service delivery.

Trigent designed a solution that included a Web UI wrapper that used familiar access and navigation techniques, within which the enhanced DICOM application UX is rendered. This design allowed for the typical clinicians to instantly switch over to the new CX using skills that they were familiar with, thereby delivering cost savings and efficiency improvements.