Background
Client is a cancer clinical trial organization, which conducts clinical trials on patients and tracks the outcome of each drug at each stage and years after completion of the trial. Normally trial continues up to 6 months and follow up happens for next 5 years.
They were already using a web solution, but given the volume of data and the concurrency of users, the application started falling short of expectations quickly. Especially the application wasn’t able to handle the large amount of files to be handled.
Moreover client also started looking for a cloud based solution to avoid the hassles of infrastructure management.
Given the proven capabilities Force.com platform, HIPPA compliant infrastructure, ready to use features and incentives for Non Profit organizations; client decided to move the whole application to Force.com platform.
Challenges
- The nature of client’s business is such that it couldn’t be paused while new system is built, but at the same time it was getting difficult to use existing system. The new solution was required in short timeframe.
- There huge amount of data to be migrated (~600 gb including files) over to Salesforce in order to be able to stop using current system completely.
- The security aspects were very important, as the application holds health records of people. The security must company with various US government regulations.
- The huge amount data processing for reports was perfect recipe for hitting salesforce governor limits, if the system not architected for handling those limits.
- The number of screen to be developed was huge for short amount time and client had preference to the UI they were used to.
- Store the historical data for audit
Solution
Based on the requirements and specification, we decided to architect the application using following components of Force.com:
- Apex and VF heavily
- Approval Processes and Validation Rules
- Apex based data Sharing
- Self-Scheduling Schedule Jobs
- Chatter (for sharing files and internal user interaction, field history tracking)
- Partner Portal (for interaction of all stake holders and independently capture some data)
- SOAP API (for data and file migration)
To migrate data from existing system to Salesforce, Talent data migration tool was used. To migrate files, a custom Java based tool was built which locates patients in Salesforce and uploaded their respective files for that patient.
The security was implemented using finest level of security framework provide by Force.com, which achieved all the security requirements.
The chatter is used in solving the large amount of files’ storage which allowed users to quickly share the files and not worry about the space available.
The approval processes framework is used to pass data through approving authority without much development around approvals.
Achievements
The initial version of the solution was deployed in production in just 8 weeks and widely appreciated. This followed up enhanced version of application going in production 16 weeks later with all major capabilities included.
The system is currently in use by more than 150 users and daily submission of 200+ forms with more than 1000 patients on trial being studies concurrently.
