Electromed, a medical device company based in Minnesota, designs, manufactures and sells an revolutionary product that assists patients with chronic respiratory issues, called a SmartVest®. These assistive devices help improve quality of life for users with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Cystic Fibrosis, and other lung conditions with a convenient, easy-to-use therapeutic device. Electromed continues rapid year-over-year growth and we’re proud to be one of their trusted partners helping to refine and scale their digital systems to enable continued growth.
Solving data integrity challenges.
Electromed contacted Emergent Software to integrate their existing electronic business management system – Brightree – with their enterprise CRM – Microsoft Dynamics. Electromed had an asynchronous solution in place when the project discovery began. They were fighting data sync, quality and consistency issues, creating more work and drawn-out processes. The company needed a way to prevent growing data problems, as well as establish a way to link multiple records for one clinic location.
While the technology platforms were in place, Electromed needed Emergent to establish processes to allow internal users to better manage data. This 6-month project involved building a cloud-based service that establishes a unique key for records to connect and merge into reliable, usable clinic data, resulting in improved data integrity. The service now informs users that a close clinic match was found and allows them to accept or create a new record for that location. This improved the data synchronization process significantly, cuts down on bad data flowing into Microsoft Dynamics, and has enabled key team members at Electromed to focus on higher-value work, rather than manually correcting data errors.
Collaborative testing to ensure quality.
In the spirit of collaboration, the Emergent and Electromed teams adopted a tandem testing strategy. No one knows their systems and data better than Electromed themselves, so they played a key role in helping us define project requirements as well as acceptance criteria (ie the conditions that must be met in order to consider a piece of work complete.) Once our software testing experts validated that acceptance criteria had been met for each feature, a team of subject matter experts from Electromed completed their acceptance testing to ensure what was initially planned for the project met the overall goals of their organization.
Adapting to change, together.
Emergent Software’s flexible delivery process ended up being a key factor to the success of this project. Through the team’s early discovery activities, where our software professionals learn about the project’s goals and prepare a high-level design and plan for delivering the solution, we uncovered configuration challenges and additional data problems neither team could have expected prior to working together. These issues needed to be addressed, so the teams decided to add this additional work to the project while it was in flight. Both parties had entered the project knowing that uncovering system and business rule complexity are typical parts of the software development process, and the trust built between them along the way allowed the teams to adapt and overcome the various challenges faced throughout the project.
Continuous improvement via continuous development.
After completing the initial data sync improvement project and enjoying the timesaving and peace-of-mind benefits, Electromed worked with us to identify additional opportunities for improvement. We are continuing our partnership through our continuous development engagement to integrate new workflows and data sync improvements, as well as working to stand up a reliable sandbox environment that will make ongoing development efforts more efficient and effective. All these efforts are unified by our overarching goal of providing trusted technology partnership for Electromed as their business continues rapid growth.
Technologies Used
