Florida Department of Health
Medical Quality Assurance
For more information on this project contact:
Jim MacLaggan at
jmaclag@versasys.com
.
or call our toll free number:
1-888-232-0224
Project Description:
Prior to July 1998, all regulation for health professionals was administered by the Florida Department of
Business and Professional Regulation on a mainframe system which did not meet the needs of the
Department of Health. Versa implemented its licensing and enforcement solution for the Department of
Health, MQA, including application tracking licensing, renewals, fees, inspections, examination
scheduling and tracking, enforcement, discipline and compliance. Services included, planning, project
management, business process re-engineering, data conversion, acceptance testing, production
support, and system and end user training. The department is structured into boards each handling
multiple professions. The business processes of each board differ and are governed by legislation and
board rules. There are 26 boards, 150 professions and some 1,000,000 active licenses. The system
runs on a SUN/Solaris database server and is connected via LAN and WAN to approximately 400 users.
Scope of Work Performed:
Versa's regulatory solution was selected as the foundation of the comprehensive, customized and
flexible online licensing system that fully supports the Department's application processing, licensing,
permitting, Examinations and Testing, and Enforcement, Discipline and Compliance functions. The
two-year implementation project was completed on time and on budget in December 1999. Versa met
every deliverable and scheduled milestone on the detailed project plan. Versa supports the system
under annual maintenance contract. In June 2003, the department approved an upgrade to
LicenseEase which included a conversion from its original Informix solution to the current Oracle n-tier
web-based architecture. The successful completion of the upgrade in May, 2005 prompted the
Department to fold in other health agencies under the MQA umbrella because the flexibility of the
LicenseEase rules-based design allowed them to be implemented through configuration and very little
custom programming effort. The new programs included:
·
The Radiological Technology Program (Oct, 2005),
·
The Bureau of Emergency Medical Services (Jan, 2006) and,
·
The Board of Pharmaceutical Services (June, 2006).
Savings were quickly realized in terms of lower overall cost of operations and improvement of staff
effectiveness through consistency of business processes. Agency staff could now focus on more high
value tasks.
Project Relevance:
·
Licensing
·
Project Management
·
Development
·
Web Development
·
Data Migration
·
Reports
·
Interfaces
·
Training
·
Mobile Inspections
Benefits to Client:
The benefits of the VERSA rules-based approach provided the Department of Health with:
·
A single solution for all boards in spite of differences in legislation,
·
A reduction in staff and administration work,
·
A consistent and effective department-wide licensing process,
·
An Improvement to accuracy and recall of information,
·
The ability to support current and future legislative changes,
·
Internet access for consumer functions.
"We have had an extremely successful implementation of our second board-Clinical Laboratory
Personnel- and are set to go live in production. The board employees had an official "funeral" for their
old XE box and turned it off at 10:30 a.m. this morning. In spite of the complexities of this conversation,
everyone did a bang up job and the users' reports in testing have been excellent. We are on schedule
and doing GREAT!!! " Diane Orcutt, Past Bureau Chief.
