    |
Web-based Health Care system
The software product Zigma from Health Corp is a UNIX based system in production with various healthcare insurance companies. Project Tahoe is the work undertaken by Calsoft to marry the convenience of the Internet to the efficiency of the legacy system running on a UNIX box with minimum changes to the existing code base of Zigma. Now healthcare providers, members and employers can access healthcare data online, 24/7, in a convenient and secure way.
Business Requirement
Zigma offers good performance and security within the current mode of operations where only qualified users of the system could access the data inside the corporate LAN. Thus, healthcare members, providers and employers would have to call the Customer Service Agents at the healthcare companies to receive any information or update any data. Hence, this mode of operation is inefficient, expensive and customer support cannot be provided round the clock.
There was only one way to remove these inefficiencies and provide accurate and up-to- date information to all users of the system. Use the power of the Internet. However, a whole range of issues dog the using of the Internet to access Zigma data, from the security of the data to the complexity of changes required on the legacy code.
Solution Benefits
Calsoft proposed and implemented a complete solution (Project Tahoe) to make available information in the Zigma system to all its users through web browsers. The solution provides high security, achieves desired performance levels, requires no additional hardware setup, requires minimum additions to the legacy code and can be easily maintained, managed and scaled.
The solution consists of Java Server Pages running on a secure web server running IBM WebSphere, which access the Zigma system running on a Unix machine, using socket connection over the Internet. Healthcare members and providers access these web pages to complete their desired transactions. The socket uses VPN to secure all the data being transacted between the web server and the Zigma system. The socket connection is continually kept open using a client application at the UNIX side and a server application on the web server side. Transaction data is transmitted over the socket in the XML format. Client side queries are formed into a XML string and passed to the server, where it is parsed and then different server side programs are called to retrieve the requested information. This information is then formed into a XML string and passed back to the client where the required HTML is generated from this XML. The user then sees this HTML response in his browser. The response times are comparable to th ose of any web-based applications.
Technology Architecture
The web based front-end of this complex system uses Java Server Pages on IBM WebSphere. SSL is used to provide page security. For the securing of the socket connection on the Internet, Virtual Private Network (VPN) is used. The client side runs as an out-of-process executable on the web server and contains the Java XML parser. On the Unix side, an application clients written in Business Basic for Unix runs in a loop making socket connections to obtain data queries, and then makes appropriate function calls to the existing programs for Zigma to retrieve or update data in Zigma.
