MoH: Cancer Registry Solution Improves Team's Productivity

Synopsis

Solnet Solutions was tasked with helping the Ministry of Health upgrade their outdated Cancer Registry system. We worked closely with the Ministry to design a solution that would meet their business needs. The solution was based on a rich client along with a rules engine, using web services for interfacing between components. Because the solution was tailored to the users' needs, the Cancer Registry team experienced a significant increase in productivity as soon as the new system went live.

The Problem

The Cancer Registry team in the Ministry of Health manually interprets pathology reports to maintain an electronic register of cancer occurrences in New Zealand. Their existing Cancer Registry system was cumbersome to use, and was based on old technology that was difficult to enhance.

The Solution

In consultation with the Ministry, Solnet designed a solution for receiving and managing the pathology reports, and for maintaining the cancer data in the registry. It included the following capabilities:

• All information related to a user task is automatically displayed on one screen. Previously, the user had to search in separate applications for some of this information.
• Data validation occurs while the user enters data, to give the user immediate feedback on data that has been entered incorrectly, or that is highly unusual. Many of the validation rules capture specialist business knowledge, and involve complex algorithms using data from external systems.
• Extensive support is available for helping users to improve data quality. For example, after the business decides to create or amend a validation business rule, the system identifies data that fails these new rules, so that users can fix them up.
• Automatic background tasks incrementally load information from external sources. This avoids the previous administration overhead of manually scheduling and running monthly batch jobs to achieve the same result.

Key technologies used in the solution

• A Rich Client (based on Eclipse), which made it easy to develop a great user experience.
• Web Services, including Web Service Security.
• Rules-based data validation, to provide a single place to maintain those rules.
• Object to Relational mapping to rapidly implement data persistency.

Success factors

Key to the success of the project was the open and honest collaboration between Solnet and the Ministry of Health. For example:

• end users were involved in designing the layout and behaviour of the screens, which ensured that the screens were optimised for the way users worked.
• joint decisions were made about how to use the chosen technologies to provide the best business value.
• the solution was developed iteratively to give the Ministry early feedback on progress and issues.
• a joint governance framework ensured that all stakeholders had visibility of the project, and problems were dealt with early.

The new system has allowed the Cancer Registry team to streamline their processes and reduce their backlog. Pathology reports are processed faster and better tools are now available to improve the quality of legacy data.