Visiting Nurse Association of Texas

VNA’s Meals on Wheels program adopts technology to help more people at less cost.

Problem

VNA Meals on Wheels (MOW) program delivers hot, frozen and shelf-stable meals to homebound and needy elderly and disabled throughout Dallas County. Meals are prepared in VNA’s kitchen and delivered by nearly 4,000 volunteers and some paid drivers. Daily census of meals is scheduled and tracked through Misys, a medical records database system. VNA’s MOW also added RoadNet, a logistics routing system produced by United Parcel Service (UPS), to assist volunteers and drivers on their daily routes. To do so, data needed to flow between Misys and RoadNet in a variety of ways. An automated system was needed to pull data from Misys on a daily basis for regular daily meals delivery. A holiday system was needed to address managing special delivery days, such as Thanksgiving. Additionally, some elements of data are not in Misys and yet are needed to supplement the RoadNet data. Besides the routing, VNA also needs reports so the kitchen can prepare the appropriate number and types of meals. These reports are used to tag meals containers for drivers to improve the efficiency of delivery.

Solution

BDC created a Microsoft SQL Server and .NET Framework application to handle management of data exchange between systems and reporting for the kitchen. BDC consulted with VNA to discover the required use cases, each handled with the end-user in mind. The Integration application is a C# .NET 3.5 application in the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. The View components consist of a command line tool which is used in the nightly task, and a desktop application which is used by VNA personnel. Both of these share the controller and model DLLs. The application was also designed using TDD (test-driven development). Though not 100% comprehensive, the test class inherently documents each unit of the code’s functionality. An intermediate SQL Server database stores the extra data for RoadNet and provides historical information about meal orders. The desktop application manipulates data in this database before sending it on to RoadNet. The desktop view allows VNA to:

Amend the data before it is finally imported back into RoadNet

Run quality control checks on the data and fix problems automatically

Perform easy queries against the intermediate database

Manually create special delivery scenarios which can override automatic processin

Results

VNA can efficiently manage fairly complex delivery situations without having to re-key thousands of records that already exist in Misys. The system is reliable and easy to update to accommodate new challenges because of the MVC and TDD design.