Transcription Management
Challenge and Solution
The business goal was to automate a new business-process outsourcing (BPO) service for healthcare industry — transcription of voice recordings made by doctors, conversion of the audio data to text format, delivery of data files between doctors and transcriptionists, as well as statistics/reporting functions.
The application designed using an N-tier architecture:
- data level based on MS SQL Server and NTFS file system;
- business logic level as XML Web Service (ASP.NET);
- presentation level as three Windows Forms applications for each type of software users (administrator, doctor, and transcriptionist).
In order to comply with the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) requirements, it was important to maintain the highest level of security when transmitting the files containing sensitive information about patients. A reliable and secure data transmission framework was created using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and WSE 2.0 (Web Services Enhancements).
Another challenge was to maintain complex logic of file states and their transmission between server and two clients (doctor and transcriptionist) and ensure notifications about the state changes to relevant users. A server-side logic was designed and implemented to ensure reliable file exchange.
Statistics and reporting features provide detailed information about completed jobs optionally split by user and time frame. This gives site users and administrator an analysis tool for performance monitoring and charge calculations.
Implementation steps were completed in close collaboration with the Technet Solutions team to ensure that the solution matches the highest customer expectations. Beta version was deployed and fully tested on the pre-production server and moved to the production server after the customer's approval.
Further development plans include integration with voice-recognition and image-recognition systems, as well as billing features, to automate all aspects of the transcription service and allow new BPO services.
Deployment
- Server platform: Microsoft Windows 2003 Server SP1 with Internet Information Services 6.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3, Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SP1, and Web Services Enhancements 2.0 SP3 installed. IIS should have an SSL certificate configured.
- Client platforms: Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003 with Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 and Web Services Enhancements 2.0 SP3 installed.
Benefits
- Created an extensible software platform for a new BPO service.
- Improved overall business efficiency by implementing the new planning, reporting and analysis processes.
- Enabled flexibility and scalability for the future system enhancements.
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