A little about the development environment at Passporthealth:
The company was founded in 1996 – around the time Mr Gore invented the internet. I believe I was the 9th developer hired, 7 of us still work here. It started off as a Microsoft, VB6 shop and has remained on the MS, VB path ever since.
Our users connect to us via our website portal to verify patient data and eligibility for services via a number of our products. We have products that allow single web based interactions, file batch transactions and EDI socket transactions. Each of these various types of requests usually result in a connection to a 3rd party to lookup or validate various patient information. We store, analyze and embellish all this data and serve it back to the requesting users. Sometimes this is an immediate response via the web browser, and sometimes we script or post the data back directly into the client’s HIS systems.
Last year we processed over a 100 million such transactions. This transaction volume and workflow creates tremendous architectural challenges for our IT team. We have vast quantities of data that are written to, searched, and re-written to. Our array of products crosses over from data-warehouse driven type applicaitons, to real time transaction processing functions.
We have tight relationships with our clients where we are intimately involved in their daily work flow; they depend on our availability and performance to effectively do their jobs. Delays, or errors caused by our vendors and partners, are our errors. We’ve successfully (imo) coded and architected around these challenges and this has allowed us to become a dependable supplier of information and utiltiy to our clients.
We have some extremely bright, dedicated and devoted developers. We solve these complex problems in unique and interesting ways every day, and our company rewards us with a great environment to work in.
My plan for this blog is to talk about those challenges and explore some of the specific solutions. Perhaps you’d like to read and comment…
