The challenge:
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) lacked the capability to electronically share veterans’ prescription data outside of a limited intra-VA network.
Project Highlights
Enabling Veterans' Prescription Flexibility
Data Engineering & Operations
Pharmacy Re-engineering
Our Approach:
Technatomy created the new solution concept, compared alternative designs through prototyping, and evolved the existing Pharmacy Reengineering (PRE) solution—in close coordination with VA’s Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Patient Care Services (PCS), Pharmacy Benefits Management (PBM) division. Our ideation process involved reimagining the then-limited system to make the data accessible (in accordance with privacy rules) for analysis, and to re-engineer and intelligently automate processing for medication order-checking and pharmacy functions, with a focus on making the data available for use by other VA-based, government-wide (e.g., Department of Defense), and external health systems.
Our releases included use of advanced technologies in the ePrescribing Processing Hub, specifically innovative partner products such as Big Data Business Intelligence (BI), which, after alternative design iterations, we implemented using Pentaho by Hitachi—enabling Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities by standardizing access to pharmacy-related data and applying pharmacy business logic. We also leveraged Fog and Edge computing resources to handle the large amounts of data. Technatomy implemented Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) with advanced Fail-Over clustering and partitioning, together with clustered Oracle WebLogic, Apache, and Redhat Enterprise Linux Virtual Machine (VM) servers. PDI’s streaming engine architecture provided the ability to work with extremely large data volumes and provided enterprise-class performance and scalability with a broad range of deployment options including dedicated, clustered, and/or cloud-based extract, transform, load (ETL) servers.
The result:
Our PRE enhancement streamlined and automated prescription data sharing processes—reducing VA’s administrative burden and improving service to our Veterans. Now, PRE integrates and ingests data from other major systems, including VistA applications, Medication Order Check Healthcare Application (MOCHA), and the Electronic Prescribing Transaction Hub. We applied emerging technologies to “reduce repetitive administrative tasks” freeing Federal employees to focus time on higher value activities and decisions. VA recognized Technatomy as an innovation leader for adoption of this hybrid approach, and for providing coaching to stakeholders to promote seamless adoption, specifically of Agile tenets.
