Resolving Technical Debt to Ready a Pharmacy Benefits Claims Processing Platform for Market

The Problem

The client chose Praxent to succeed where its previous partner had fallen short, to deliver a development-ready application on time and on budget with clean, consistent, well-documented code and outstanding UX/UI. Their biggest challenge was to overcome the mountain of technical debt generated by their previous partner, which had left them unable to move forward quickly.

• Extended Timelines: Development of the application, which originally was scheduled to be completed by October 2020, was delayed twice.
• Growing Costs: The client had significant investment with its previous development partner and did not receive a market-ready product.
• Massive Inefficiencies: The client’s previous partner wasted time on inefficient requirements, meetings, and lacking documentation.
• Integration Gaps: Because the application layers were tested in silos, they were not fully integrated. The UI screens matched the wireframes, but they were not connected to the database or API.
• Non-Existent QA: The client was having to spend as many as five hours of their own time on manual end-to-end QA testing, which repeatedly revealed significant issues.
• Outstanding Bugs: There were several broken features within the application, including issues with cross-browser compatibility. This was a major problem because most users were deploying the application on Windows-based operating systems. 

Results/ROI

The Praxent team’s work accelerated the application’s release timeline from 2022 to 2020 and came in 8% under budget with positive reviews of the initial product demos.

Praxent removed major inconsistencies throughout the entire platform—due to previous development partners having stored all of the code in separate branches—and created a single branch of code, taking advantage of reuse wherever possible. The result was a platform that was consistent throughout, and the team’s reuse of code saved the client time and money.

Thanks to a smooth handoff, clear recommendations, and ongoing support from the Praxent team, the client’s team was able to move forward with the application with no issues.

Client Testimonial

Why Praxent

“We were looking for a development team that was more professional than the one we were using beforehand, a group that could ramp up much quicker than our previous vendor could, and a group that actually would listen more than simply think they knew what they were doing.

The group we were using beforehand was based on the West Coast, and it felt more important that their employees get in-office perks during the work day than to ask us questions when they had an issue. It became apparent that a couple of people they brought on to the project, though very nice and well intentioned, did not have the skill set required for the project. Overall, we would have benefited from increased management.

We wanted an enterprise-class platform that could handle our various lines of business.

There are a couple reasons we chose Praxent over other providers. We had looked in the marketplace for key shops, and we looked at their staff. Basically, we were looking for somebody that was known as professional, knew how to conclude jobs, was highly rated. We did various searches. We also engaged on an outside resource to do a little follow up and digging into Praxent, and they came out with very good reviews of the process and the team overall.

Praxent definitely exceeded our expectations. They opened our eyes to a lot of technical debt—we were unaware how prevalent it really was.

There were a number of key individuals that were standouts, but the UI team has done a fabulous job in what they provided and in how they gathered the information. There were definitely some key developers that were always supportive. 

For the duration of the project, there wasn’t a whole lot of turnover as sometimes happens.

They definitely addressed the underlying technical debt and brought us to a place that makes moving forward much easier.

Overall, it has been a very positive relationship, a positive partnership.”

The Handoff

About the transition from the old development shop to Praxent: “Let’s just say the previous development group did everything they could to discourage a transition, not really focusing on anything other than ‘Well in transition, things always get worse.’ They did everything they could to try and scare us off the transition, which, to me, is another issue.

About the transition from Praxent at the end of the engagement: “The handoff was as smooth and as well done as I could have imagined.

“The Praxent team spent a lot of time, for instance, I think it was Nadeem that made sure he recorded significant amounts of information. So it wasn’t just ‘Here’s a document.’ He provided a recording of everything like the status it’s in and so forth. It gave the team on our side invaluable information. The UI team did a great job making sure that all of the screen information they had was as up to date as possible and available in the Invision account for us to take over.

“So, it was very well documented. The project management team kept everything as up to date in terms of the documentation as possible. People made themselves available to ensure that if we had questions or were looking for information, they knew where it was and they provided us the guidance.

“There has been nothing negative. It’s all been positive as it relates to the transition and the code that’s been developed and cleaned up by the Praxent team. It’s all been positive.

“I wouldn’t change anything except for, you know, having the whole team sit in our office every day for a couple of months to work through things. They did a great job on the transition.

“We’re able to do small things now. Through all of the previous development, all the code was stored in different branches. It took us probably till close to the end of our time frame together that we actually got all of the code into a single branch. That was a major issue the team took care of. A lot of the application itself is very consistent; there was a lot of reuse, and the previous development team didn’t tend to take advantage of that. The Praxent team did a great job of moving those things toward more consistency throughout the entire platform, as well as being able to get some things done quicker than the previous team did because of that reuse.

“I’m much more confident in the platform than I was when the old development team had supposedly gotten it ready for us.

“Everything the Praxent team touched made an impact. For instance, there are edits that control how a claim processes. While the previous team created a number of these, it wasn’t always done as well as it should be. It wasn’t consistent from one type to the next. The Praxent folks understood that continuity, that consistency, and a lot of their clean up changed it to move it in a consistent direction. It sounds very simple, but it was an extremely important part of how the platform needs to function. So they definitely took us from, a lot of not necessarily consistent approaches to a much more consistent approach, a much more user-friendly workflow.”

Results

“Somebody had seen the product demo and said, ‘You’re basically building a Ferrari rather than a Chevy, and in this industry that actually makes a lot of sense in terms of understanding that distinction.’ We’re able to do things for our investors’ plan in a matter of a few minutes that takes other processors 10 days, 30 days to do and release.

“We’re able to capture a lot of information, so when people ask, ‘Can you do this?’ we can very simply say, ‘Yes, this is how you do it.’

“We had a short-term requirement that Eric was extremely helpful with in terms of getting an API for a pharmacy chain to submit test claims effectively, and we were able to work with him and obviously others on the team, but they were able to get that up and running in the time we had allotted for it, which was a little shorter than many other projects.”

Testimonial provided by Timothy Humphreys – Managing Partner, Procella Health