Case Studies - THE HEALTHCARE INSURANCE RECIPROCAL OF CANADA (HIROC)

The Client

HIROC is Canada’s leading provider of healthcare liability insurance. Together with their brokerage, HIROC provides customers with a comprehensive range of insurance services, including risk management programs, innovative insurance products and unparalleled claims management expertise. HIROC customers include hospitals and other patient care institutions, such as nursing homes, community health centres, or midwife practice groups. They are dedicated to minimizing risk in health care.

HIROC RMSAM (Risk Management Self Appraisal Modules)

Project Description:

The purpose of the RMSAM is to allow health-care facilities to examine their processes and discover what areas are particularly vulnerable to risk (e.g. scheduling, staff-orientation, or other processes in a radiology department). The original RMSAM was a paper based set of questionnaires, covering approximately 15 modules (depending on the nature of the client institution). Filling out these questionnaires qualified organizations for discounts on their liability insurance premiums, and allowed HIROC to make recommendations for better practices. Because the questionnaires were lengthy, and the process of completion and aggregation and reconciliation of information was quite complex, HIROC had an overwhelming practical need to automate the process. In December 2004 they approached bitHeads to lead development of an ultimate solution.

The bitHeads Solution:

One of the most cumbersome aspects of the paper-based system had to do with rolling-up information within an organizational hierarchy, identifying points where different team members gave different answers to the same question. The challenge in automating the process was in creating a flexible hierarchy structure, with review points at different positions within the hierarchy. bitHeads approach allows facilities to customize their organizational structure (and determine which parts of the organization get which modules). This allows reconciliation of data by group leaders who can easily flag where organizational processes are unclear or misunderstood. As a Web-based application, discrepancies in answers are noted at each higher level in the organization for clarification, resulting finally in only answers of “no” or “partial” (in comparison with HIROC best-practices) to be reported as potential problem areas. Dealing with health care professionals as end users, it was critical to create an application that was absolutely user friendly, masking the complexity under the hood. This was an iterative process, improving the application with HIROC and HIROC’s client organizations to reach an ultimate final product. This computerized RMSAM would massively reduce the man-hours devoted by HIROC to support facilities in this process, and to manage the information to come out of the process. In creating this application, bitHeads developed an architecture from the ground up, using SQL Server, Java Server Pages, HTML, XML, Tomcat, Tapestry, and Hibernate technologies.

Results:

The HIROC RMSAM was rolled out in 2006 and has received rave reviews from HIROC and user facilities as an improvement over the cumbersome old system. The RMSAM now allows health care facilities to easily identify any high-risk or unclear areas in their practices.