Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Dental-Practice Management Group Modernizes Midrange System and Cuts Costs
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Healthcare
Customer Profile
Based in Syracuse, New York, Aspen Dental Management, Inc. (ADMI) is a retail dental-practice management group. It provides business, operational, and marketing services to affiliated dentists in more than 75 offices in seven states.
Business Situation
ADMI wanted to create a simpler user interface for its IBM AS/400 midrange application and ease the deployment of interface changes—without rewriting existing code.
Solution
ADMI deployed the ApplinX application from Microsoft® partner Software AG. ApplinX exposes midrange applications to the Microsoft .NET Framework, so companies can create intuitive interfaces and use service-oriented architecture.
Benefits
Reduces training time by 50 percent
Cuts cost of deploying software changes by more than 90 percent
Preserves IT investments
Improves data integration
Helps improve patient care / “By extending and integrating our midrange system, we have a valuable tool that makes it easier for our dental practices to provide high-quality care to our patients.”
Mark Frank, Manager, Marketing Communications, Aspen Dental Management, Inc.
Aspen Dental Management, Inc. (ADMI), which provides business support services to its affiliated dental practices, wanted to extend its IBM AS/400 midrange system with a simpler interface and an easier method for deploying software changes. With help from Microsoft® partners Farina and Associates and Software AG, the company evaluated ApplinX from Software AG. ApplinX links existing systems to a variety of interfaces and programs, helping customers stay current without expensive IT upgrades. ADMI implemented ApplinX to expose its AS/400 system to the Microsoft .NET Framework, enabling the creation of an intuitive interface and easier deployments without changes to existing code. Because of the new interface, ADMI spends 50 percent less time training employees to use the system. And, ADMI makes system changes centrally, reducing the cost to implement changes by more than 90 percent.
Situation
Aspen Dental Management, Inc. (ADMI) provides dental-practice management services to affiliated dentists in the Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States, supporting more than 600,000 patient visits a year. It offers marketing, centralized billing, human resources, and IT services to its more than 75 locations in seven states from its Syracuse, New York, practice support center. The company is growing rapidly; ADMI had 13 dental offices in 1998 and expects to have approximately 100 dental offices by the end of 2006.
To manage operations, ADMI used a proprietary midrange application running on an IBM AS/400 server computer. Although the system offered rich features and worked effectively, it had a complex interface. For example, dental office staff used two-dozen different screens to enter patient information. It was also time-consuming for ADMI to train users. The green-screen midrange interface was unfamiliar to many new employees, and the application offered multiple ways to complete the same function. “With our old system, there was any number of ways to do any given function: you could click here, select the tab, hide the command, hold down a menu, etc. to do the same task,” says Bob Weiss, Vice President of Information Services at ADMI. “For a new user, this was rather intimidating.”
Another disadvantage of the midrange system was that changes to the user interface needed to be deployed on workstations at the various offices. As ADMI opened additional offices spread over a wider geographical area, this procedure became more time-consuming and difficult. Previously, a widespread change required a few weeks of planning, coordination, and execution by two IT people. In addition, changes caused disruptions in some offices. This effort became more complicated as the company continued to grow.
Solution
Aspen Dental Management began looking for a way to keep its midrange application and still provide a simpler interface, as well as Web features, for easy deployment. The company considered a variety of applications. In September 2004, ADMI representatives met with Farina and Associates, an Albany, New York-based company that works with small to midsize businesses that are using IBM AS/400 midrange systems. Farina and Associates specializes in updating these systems to the Microsoft® Windows®operating system and Web environments by writing custom applications and offering third-party applications.
After examining the existing systems and infrastructure at ADMI, Farina and Associates recommended a modernization tool called ApplinX from Software AG. Based in Darmstadt, Germany, Software AG offers enterprise application development and data management technologies as well as process-driven integration and modernization solutions to more than 3,000 customers around the world.
Alliance Helps Businesses Extend and Integrate Systems
Both Farina and Associates and Software AG are members of the Microsoft-founded Midrange Alliance Program (MAP), a partnership of independent software and hardware vendors working to offer midrange users tools and software to extend and integrate their existing IT systems. MAP was created to help businesses use new technologies in conjunction with their midrange systems, thereby avoiding costly upgrades and preserving their IT staff’s midrange skills.
ApplinX is a platform-independent tool that meets MAP goals by helping businesses integrate existing applications into modern Web and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The tool captures business-critical data, transaction models, and user-session workflows and fits them seamlessly into new application environments such as Microsoft .NET connection software.
Using a variety of adapters, ApplinX encapsulates business processes running on the midrange environment and brings them into the Microsoft .NET Framework, a component of the Microsoft Windows operating system). The encapsulated processes are invoked by the .NET Framework applications, triggering ApplinX to execute the midrange services and return the results to the .NET Framework environment. No code is changed, and the existing systems are not altered.
New Application Installed in Only Three Weeks
Keeping Farina and Associates as a main point of contact and consultant, ADMI began working with Software AG to determine if the tool was the right fit for its needs. In October of 2004, Software AG sent out a solutions consultant who evaluated the existing systems and discussed what ADMI was hoping to achieve. A week later, the consultant came back with a proof of concept demonstrating the tool in the company’s environment. ADMI liked what it saw. “At the proof of concept, we saw that this product is flexible and fairly intuitive and decided to go with it,” says Weiss. ADMI brought its own developers into the project, and the company began the implementation process. Within three weeks, ADMI installed ApplinX, created a prototype of the solution, and completed training.
Benefits
By creating a new user interface using ApplinX and the .NET Framework, Aspen Dental Management has halved the amount of time it spends training employees to use its midrange application. With the new solution, the company has also increased employee satisfaction, simplified software deployments, improved data integration, and increased personal interaction between employees and patients.
Reduces Training Time by 50 Percent
By taking advantage of the rich .NETFramework environment, ADMI has been able to create a graphical user interface that is intuitive for users and dramatically cuts training time. “We open new offices all the time and plan to grow to more than 200 locations in the next few years, and we need to train the employees in those offices,” says Weiss. “It’s much easier to train people to use these new software tools. Training time has been reduced by at least 50 percent.”
Increases Employee Satisfaction
Often, users comfortable with an application are reluctant to move to a new tool. The new interface created by ADMI allows for all the same functions of the existing application but with a simpler approach—more than a dozen midrange screens have been consolidated into a handful of Web pages. The move has gained favorable responses from staff. “Our office managers have been extremely pleased,” says Weiss. “Even staff members who were very comfortable with the old way of doing things agree this is a much easier way to achieve the same results.”
Cuts Cost of Deploying Software Changes by More Than 90 Percent
For IT staff, one of the biggest benefits of the ApplinX application and the integration with the .NET Framework is the reduction in deployment time and effort. It is very important to ADMI that every location works in the same environment and that upgrades or changes are all done at the same time. Before the installation, upgrades and deployments had to be done at each clinic. Now the company is able to make its changes from its Syracuse headquarters and have them automatically go out to the individual locations. This has reduced the cost to implement changes by more than 90 percent, and it has allowed IT staff to focus on other projects. “We no longer have the expense of the resource-intensive changes we had prior to ApplinX,” says Jim Pavente, Information Services Manager at ADMI. “Now, changes and updates are a minimal time issue for our IT staff. Aside from the normal testing cycles, we’ve virtually eliminated the effort associated with coordinating a deployment of our clinical system user interface.”
Preserves IT Investments
By using the MAP approach of extending and integrating existing hardware and software, ADMI gained a cost-effective solution with reduced risk. “We're not developing a brand new system. We're just building on top of something that’s proven and reliable and has a very solid foundation,” says Pavente. “We're just changing how you get to the application and how you see it.”
Improves Data Integration
With the new system, ADMI has been able to combine data from its midrange application with data from other sources. “We have a data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000. We can pull data from that and combine it with our practice management system information,” says Weiss. “The ability to integrate data is a big benefit for us: we can quickly and easily pull information from the most convenient source and display it in a very effective manner for our users.”
Helps Improve Patient Care and Satisfaction
ADMI specializes in serving patients who have no regular dentist or pattern of dental visits. “Our typical patient needs a little assistance,” says Mark Frank, Manager, Marketing Communications at ADMI. “So the personal interaction between our associates and our patients is very important.” Because the new system streamlines tasks, ADMI employees have more time to spend with patients. “Everything we do in IT is to help our practices provide the best possible care,” Frank says. “By extending and integrating our midrange system, we have a valuable tool that makes it easier for our dental practices to provide high-quality care to our patients.”
Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
For more information about Microsoft .NETand Web services, please visit these Web sites:
msdn.microsoft.com/webservices