Provider brings ASP model to healthcare

Delivering e-services eliminates e3000 platform pressures

New application installations make up the core of growth for a computer platform, the gateway for rookie users of veteran systems like the HP e3000. But prejudices about that 28-year-old system can bar the door to such installations, as IT managers struggle to justify adding a platform that can look unfamiliar. A long-time solution provider for the platform is breaking down the barriers with a successful Application Services Provider (ASP) model, implemented in a sector where the e3000 system already has high marks: healthcare.

Neil Harvey Associates (NHA) is keeping a staff of more than 40 busy in South Africa, where the company has been in business for more than 15 years. All of the firm’s clients do their healthcare administration using HP 3000s. But in recent years the business has become one of e-services, supplied from servers located at the firm’s headquarters in Cape Town.

“It was in self-defense that we took to the ASP model,” Harvey explained. “In the dark years when HP seemed to have abandoned the HP 3000 platform, we found it very difficult to convince existing HP 3000 clients the platform had a life. We also found it especially difficult to sell to new clients. Our ultimate goal is to house the servers ourselves, and let the clients run them through networks.”

The company offers a full spectrum of services, from maintaining the master files, collecting and reconciling premiums, assessing the claims against “fairly complex rules” in South Africa, and paying service providers.

The company uses imaging techniques to manage the paper, and the Internet to manage inquiries. “We have empowered the end users of the healthcare systems — the doctors and the members — to answer their own enquiries.” Harvey said. “It’s enquiries that cripple administrators.”

The task of shifting from hardware-software sales to delivering over the Internet is greater in South Africa, because of the country’s lesser bandwidth. The largest corporations in the country operate with communication pipes no larger than 128Kb/second, a small fraction of the bandwidth available in places like Europe or the United States. NHA has had to be clever about how it uses the Internet because of these telecom limitations, even as the firm employs the limit-busting Internet services now available for the e3000.

As the company has pushed the enquiries away from call centers for its healthcare clients, it’s been testing a faster Telnet connection technology for its HP 3000s called Advanced Telnet. HP has been preparing the technology for general release, but NHA has been putting Advanced Telnet through its paces for more than two years in beta test.

“It’s exciting for me to work on the Advanced Telnet protocol, which shows enormous promise for us in our environment,” Harvey said. “Our network pipes are very thin and very expensive.” Rich Web sites simply can’t serve in South Africa, so NHA has altered the Internet equation to let customers receive Web page information through e-mail transmissions.

At the same time, Advanced Telnet could make better use of the thin pipes to maximize communication directly with the HP 3000s at NHA headquarters. Harvey said this would make it possible for companies to manage their data on remote servers, and keep the ASP model cost effective for all.

“It’s not in general release yet, but it will be pretty soon,” Harvey said, “and it’s an open technology, so all terminal emulator makers will have access to it. It is a quantum leap better than straight Telnet, because it’s a combination of what was good about NS/VT and what’s good about Telnet.”

NHA relies on the latest ports of Samba, sendmail and Gnu C++ for the e3000, to “emulate the Web in e-mail,” Harvey explains. “Our clients are able to send an inquiry by e-mail and receive back what is ostensibly a Web page. We’ve overcome the corporate fear of choking their very thin Internet connections.” It’s an all-HP 3000 solution, with sendmail running a script which picks up and renders a Web page and returning it to answer the inquiry.

Balancing the use of such nouveau technology is a backbone of thin client architecture. The NHA applications have relied on Cognos PowerHouse for many years, a choice Harvey considers lucky — because it kept the programs slim in an era when many were growing fat.

“Using PowerHouse in character mode is very much a thin client application,” Harvey said. “We were lucky to escape the stampede towards client server. We came out of that era with a fat host, thin client application. PowerHouse sends only the data it needs to display on the screen.”

Things like sendmail and Gnu C++ aren’t on HP’s supported product list yet, but NHA doesn’t let that deter them. “No software is unsupported, so long as we’re supporting it. We won’t deploy anything that’s inherently unstable. We thoroughly test the software, and we have sufficient faith that the very strong and close-knit 3000 community will ensure these contributed tools continue to advance. That’s one of the great things about MPE: its user community. That’s what gives me the confidence to use these tools.”

NHA spent “many hours convincing clients to stay on the platform” in the past, but the new model — to forget the specifics of IT, and just do business with NHA handling the details — is working. “The ASP model works for us simply because we remove from the client all the nightmare of managing an IT shop,” Harvey said. “There’s no more meeting about budgets, agonizing about the cost of desktops. We own it, deploy it, and we decide when to upgrade.”

The expanding capabilities of the HP 3000, buoyed by contributed solutions adding Internet capabilities, make that easier. “Wherever possible, I try to stick to the HP 3000 as my platform of choice,” Harvey said. “It’s a brilliant operating system, but it’s been taken to new heights by this very strong community.”