CASE STUDY

Veteran Health Administration (VHA) provides more than 25 million veterans and their families with patient care and health benefits through 1,264 facilities nationwide. The VHA enrollment process is faced with a growing number of ever-changing regulations that, when combined with the large number of constituents served, created a process too complex for the existing systems to handle. The functionality of several of VHA’s Veterans Health Information Systems & Technology Architecture (VistA) applications did not provide sufficiently robust data elements needed to support automated billing as commonly practiced in private sector hospitals. VHA’s VistA Clinical applications, VistA Integrated Billing (IB) & Accounts Receivable (A/R) applications did not efficiently or effectively support VHA’s financial business processes. The implementation of various improved business practices and tools by multiple VHA and contract staff to meet the desired performance improvements required a well-coordinated project management approach to ensure overall project success.

IMS provided guidance and consulting services to the VA and it’s system developers to integrate their preliminary project schedules in the Primavera TeamPlay project management system. A detailed integrated project, Integration, Testing and Deployment (ITD), was developed and maintained throughout a 2 plus year period. ITD provided extensive details about the integration effort plus cross project ties to the various contributing VA systems being integrated.

IMS successfully assisted the contributing development teams with maintaining their project schedules. Through collaboration with the team member, IMS consultant created and maintained the ITD schedule which provided inter project schedule performance data used to make timely and informed project management decision.