The Customer
A consulting company specializing in staffing solutions for hospitals.
The Project
Transforming Healthcare Staffing
Overview
The Customer faced challenges with their legacy application. Built on the outdated DBROCKET platform, it lacked extensibility, testing capabilities, and a user-friendly interface. Improving was tasked with modernizing the application to provide the Customer with a more maintainable and scalable solution.
The Challenge
The Customer's legacy application was essential for forecasting staffing needs in hospitals, but its foundation on the obscure DBROCKET platform made maintenance and enhancements difficult. The application's lack of a mobile-friendly and responsive interface led to inefficiencies in staff scheduling, costing hospitals valuable resources.
The Solution
Improving migrated the legacy application from DBROCKET to a modern technology stack, selecting Spring Boot and Groovy for backend development to ensure better maintainability and extensibility. We introduced unit tests to improve code quality and reliability.
For the user interface, we developed a new web application with a responsive calendar feature, allowing easy management of shifts and incentivizing staff with higher pay rates for early pickups. The project also included containerizing the application and deploying it on AWS, standardizing the developer environment with Vagrant files, and automating deployment with Ansible playbooks.
Business Benefits
Improved User Experience: The new web application's mobile-friendly and responsive interface enhanced usability for hospital staff.
Streamlined Staffing Processes: The calendar feature enabled hospitals to manage and offer shifts efficiently, improving staffing levels and response times.
Cost Savings: Optimized staffing, based on data-driven recommendations, led to an average overhead cost reduction of 22% for hospitals.
Enhanced Maintainability: Migration to Spring Boot and Groovy, coupled with unit testing, made the application easier to maintain and enhance.
Efficient Deployment: Standardized and automated deployment processes reduced errors and deployment time, increasing system reliability and efficiency.
Lessons Learned
The project underscored the importance of building stakeholder trust, understanding legacy application business processes, avoiding unnecessary complexity, managing change effectively, and building a sustainable development team for long-term success.
Why Improving?
The application modernization project transformed the Customers' legacy application into a modern, scalable, and user-friendly solution, significantly improving the staffing process for hospitals. The migration to a modern technology stack, coupled with a responsive web application and streamlined deployment processes, brought about cost savings, improved maintainability, and a more agile system ready for future needs.
Get Started
Learn more about how Improving can help you get started by contacting us today at sales@improving.com or filling out a contact form through the link below.
