| Issue: | Medical Billing Technologies, Inc., (MBT) serves school districts, county offices of education, community colleges, public health departments and community-based organizations, helping them to participate in four federally-funded reimbursement programs administered by the California Department of Health Care Services. More than one million children in California lack health insurance. MBT’s chief goal is to support school and community efforts to link eligible children with available insurance and health care services. By promoting general wellness and development, these efforts improve the ability of children to attend school and increase their capacity to learn. By actively engaging in these efforts, MBT helps create sustainable health care systems for California children and their families. MBT had an existing application used by participants and by internal MBT staff to assist school districts to obtain reimbursement for the health care services they were providing to children in California’s MAA Program. The main issues with the system were that it was not very easy to use, and it was not compatible with the web. MBT wanted a new, easy to use application that would enable MBT staff and all the participants of the program, to save time on data entry and processing. The design and development phase of the new application was tight. Development started on the 15th of June, with final delivery required by 14 September so school districts could begin to use the new application for their new school term..
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| Solution: | GThe result was the creation of a new application called, MAATS 2.0. MBT worked with consultant, Frank Calderero (CIO OnDemand). He conducted several working sessions to define the requirements for the new application. "Work on the MBT project turned out to be very useful and interesting. The interesting part was that we were given a general idea of the product and then the development work including design and technologies was completely up to us. It is always challenging and interesting to do a project from scratch and with more flexibility.” Vasyl K., Softjourn Project Manager Throughout the course of the project, MBT staff met daily with Softjourn’s project manager, as well, weekly steering committee meetings were conducted involving multiple levels of management, in order to make sure the project was always on track. Agile development methodology was used with new requirements coming up frequently. MBT and Softjourn looked at each requirement and determined its priority and if it could be done in the required time frame or not, or if another task had to be removed in order to get a new higher priority task in to the schedule. Commenting on the development process, Mr. Calderaro stated that, “I would not hesitate to work with Softjourn again, they did everything that was asked of them and they were very flexible in working within the framework of the project.”
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| Result: | One of the goals for MAATS 2.0 was to make the application more intuitive and simplify the process of entering and finalizing time surveys. This requirement has been met and then some. The new app also facilitates faster approval of time surveys and allows MBT to serve more clients with fewer total staff. A bigger change is that the new system is enabling MBT to deliver their business in a different way. They can assist the participants at the school districts in a more personalized way while further maximizing reimbursement from the state Medi-cal program. According to Frank, “MAATS 2.0 is more intuitive than the old system, and it is already enabling MBT to rethink how MBT delivers services for MAA.” Approximately 25% of MBT’s customers are using the new application, with over 2000 users already trained. Commenting on the outsourcing arrangement, Mr. Calderaro stated that Softjourn delivers just like their slogan says, “It’s not how far away we are, It’s how close we work with you!” |
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It's not how far away we are. It's how close we work with you!
