VITech earns their repeated business because of their quality of development and knowledge of the health care industry. Their most recent project earned one of the highest scores on a company grading metric. Their team has passion and care for their work, making them a great partner to work with.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I am the senior manager of development and architecture for a health management company.
What challenge were you trying to address with VITech?
We’re a product of an acquisition, and needed help with technical issues. They’re our technology partner and we’ve grown together.
What was the scope of their involvement?
We’ve done many projects together, but I’ll describe our most recent. Last year, we defined a new product to look at populations and manage them for health care organizations. They helped us create something like a Google search for these populations.
A simple example is we can tell the tool to give the user everyone who smokes but never participated in a smoking cessation program. Or it can get very complicated with employers and groupings. For instance, a user can tell it to give them everyone who’s over the age of 18, diabetic, hasn’t had a poor episode, hasn’t been to the doctor in the last six months, and works for a certain company.
We built this search engine to help identify and target population cohorts. The engine was built in Java, mostly, but also using JavaScript and Scala. We gave them all the requirements, and then they collaborated with us because of their health care experience. This allowed them to finalize the concept and do the bulk of the development.
What is the team composition?
We work with about 50 people from their team.
How did you come to work with VITech?
There has been a partnership for a while, and we’re required by our parent company to work with them. However, their quality in development and knowledge of health care has earned them our repeated business.
What is the status of this engagement?
We began work in July 2016 and the work is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
I maintain our development metrics and we consistently have evolved on practices that we put together with static code analysis and building of pipelines.
There is a software center of excellence in our parent company that independently assesses software development practices. On the most recent project, we scaled 78 out of a 100 point scale. That score puts us in the top tier of projects, much higher than the company average.
How did VITech perform from a project management standpoint?
There have been no issues with scheduling, meeting deadlines, or keeping to timelines. We use Slack with them.
What did you find most impressive about them?
I appreciate that they have a group of people who value caring and passion. If something’s going well, they take it as a victory. If something’s going wrong, they’re quick to fix it. We know somebody is going to pick up on any issue and eliminate it. We appreciate good processes, and they have good processes.
Are there any areas they could improve?
No, they’re fairly perfect.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Expectation management is key, although that’s general advice. You can also have technical discussions with them on the project. With these, you can understand their recommendations and use them to achieve your goal results.
Tell us about your project and we’ll be glad to help.