Altamont Solutions has executed a wide range of projects with an wide array of technologies, platforms and challenges since its founding. The Altamont Solutions team brings even broader experience delivering creative solutions to complex problems. We have worked with companies from the pre-funding startups in their earliest stages to nationwide healthcare providers. A sampling of Altamont’s project experience is found below:
Patient Recruitment and Management Toolkit
Pharmacy Automation
Blood Treatment Workflow and Data Management System
Medical Claims Analysis
Offline Data Cubes
Patient Recruitment and Management Toolkit
The Challenge:
Altamont Solutions was challenged with creating a patient recruitment system for an automated pharmacy system servicing dialysis patients for the nations largest renal care provider. The project constraints included a non-technical user base operating in a distributed environment where internet connectivity was not assured.
The Solution:
The user and patient facing side of the solution is a Tablet PC based application supporting the collection of patient demographics, currently prescribed medicines, payment, provider and insurance information. Also required is the ability to scan various forms and benefit cards, then trim and store the images for later use.
Hand writing recognition is used throughout the application. Later versions included interactive status reports and dashboards.
Patient recruitment takes place in dialysis facilities across the country where instant data communication is not guaranteed. The answer was to maintain the pertinent subset of the server data locally, so that when a connection became available, updated and added information is merged back to the master database. Client side bandwidth constriction compelled image manipulation and compression as part of optimizing the synchronization.
Altamont Solutions created the application using a versatile object layer with an eye on code reuse. Early analysis determined that the application would need to evolve with the customer’s business model - as much as possible functions and validation rules were configurable so that changes could be made without the recompilation and redeployment of the application.
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Pharmacy Automation
The Challenge:
Altamont Solutions was tasked with creating a system to assemble and store data from many divisions of a Fortune 500 company locally, associate it with data collected by agents using a wide variety of applications and send it on to an automated pharmacy system delivering prescription drugs to patients at dialysis clinics across the country.
The Solution:
The solution was a wide ranging set of applications, sub systems and reports centered around an Oracle database. One of the most challenging elements was the creation of the data interface between the SxC and the client’s data system. The SxC system was transmitting and receiving HL7 formatted communications over a sockets connection and included hundreds of data fields. Altamont created a flexible, configurable receiver so that the inevitable changes in both the source message format, and the local data structure required no recoding and recompiling - only changes to the configuration files.
Other applications handled workflows to process patient, payer and physician communications via phone, email and fax so that exceptions could be handled quickly, without delaying the delivery of the patient’s medicine. Additional pieces included generation of patient facing documents, labels and for shipping and reports back to various stake-holders.
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Blood Treatment Workflow and Data Management System
The Challenge:
Altamont Solutions inherited a legacy application that had been through several outsourcing failures. The system managed a pathogen inactivation process in human blood products. The changes for the new implementation included expanding the functionality to incorporate multiple blood product types, creating a configurable workflow and improving the user experience. The changes had to be made while meeting the requirements of an FDA 510K submission as well as EU standards for blood bank software.
The Solution:
The client needed a system to manage the workflow of their blood product treatment. Altamont Solutions created an application that manages and documents the pre and post treatment processes. Designed to be sold into the European market, the application is a multi-lingual application that communicates not only with the treatment device but blood bank data systems. The system can also be configured to validate and accept a wide range of bar code symbologies.
Completing the project required following a formal validation and verification process including tracing of requirements to code artifacts and test plan. Altamont Solutions has the policies and procedures in place to meet these requirements as well as a strong relationship with an international software test firm that executed and documented all the formal testing.
By far the greatest challenge was correcting the legacy code base to accommodate the new feature set , while improving the maintainability so that future changes are simpler, cheaper and have less risk.
This was essentially a delivery of a shrink wrapped application for the EU market. The roll out has exceeded the expectations of everyone involved.
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Medical Claims Analysis
The Challenge:
Prompted by cost constraints faced by the client, Altamont created an implantation plan that allows maximum impact in the early iterations of the solutions while still supporting future scalability. The client wanted to use existing medical claims to do three things:
Project potential payor savings
Perform cost reconciliation
Accurately identify patients as candidates for the test
The Solution:
Due to cost constraints faced by the client Altamont created an implantation plan that allows maximum impact in the early iterations of the solutions while still supporting future scalability. The initial phase provided both a proof of concept and a powerful multi-dimensional analytical tool allowing the client to give hard evidence of the savings possible for a large potential customer.
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Offline Data Cubes
The Challenge:
Altamont Solutions was creating a large transactional database for patients and their prescription medications. The client wanted to scale rapidly before their design was finalized. At a time when both technical systems and business processes were in flux the client wanted to gather hard data for program efficacy and best-practice analysis.
The Solution:
With all aspects of the operation changing it was the wrong time to build out a data warehouse implementation, yet the client’s senior management was clamoring for analytic tools. Altamont identified the problem and proposed, designed and deployed a small system that allowed a data analyst to create distributable OLAP cubes that were accessed using Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables. For a low cost Altamont provided the information needed in a tool with which management was already familiar.
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