Children's Mercy Family Health Partners Accelerates Application Delivery with Aldon ALM

Powerful Process Controls Help Improve Productivity, Minimize Errors

Emeryville, CA—October-28-2008—Aldon, the ALM experts, today announced that Children's Mercy Family Health Partners (CMFHP) has successfully implemented the Aldon Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution across its multi-platform development team, bringing new levels of quality and control to application delivery. With Aldon in place, CMFHP benefits from unified processes, workflow automation, role-based project visibility, and a central inventory of all application components. State IT audits are now simplified, development projects delivered faster and coding errors reduced.

CMFHP has a development staff of nine coding in RPG and .NET on a variety of applications ranging from Claims Filing to Case Management to Medicaid Reporting to Check Tracking; and all need constant updating. Without formalized processes and project visibility, CMFHP found code changes could easily be erased or development efforts duplicated. That is no longer the case with the ALM solution in place.

“With Aldon, we now have a full multi-tier inventory management of applications, source code, services, and more,” said Paul Burkhart, IT Development Manager, Children's Mercy Family Health Partners. “Developers can quickly find and rapidly assemble applications and see who is working on what. Our .NET programmers are now able to consolidate the source for our various applications into a single repository. This feature has been invaluable for them.”

Aldon also provides CMFHP with process automation so that best-practice rules and corporate procedures can be defined and enforced to create standard, repeatable development processes. For example, CMFHP can now automate the software promotion process to ensure that source code is promoted only when certain criteria have been met, e.g., unit testing has been performed, or the end users have signaled their acceptance.

It is Aldon's powerful “promotions to production” component that proves most beneficial for the organization. Now CMFHP simply identifies the objects or projects they wish to promote and Aldon automatically knows where the code is, where the code needs to go, how to create the objects, what dependent objects need to be created, how to assign the authorities and which objects need to be distributed to what machines on the network. The entire process is predefined, making promotions a one-step process.

The nature of the healthcare industry also means the organization is dealing with frequent HIPAA audits (ensuring privacy of confidential medical records) in which there needs to be a precise documentation of workflow across all of IT. The Aldon solution provides CMFHP with that structured, repeatable and auditable software development process so that requests and changes to the IT team and business units are tracked at all times. In order for CMFHP to demonstrate HIPAA compliance in this regard, it is now simply a matter of setting up the appropriate processes and generating the necessary reports. Another key benefit for CMFHP is that Aldon solutions enable the developers to access and change their business applications without ever leaving the Aldon environment. This speeds up productivity so business objectives are met more quickly.

Burkhart adds, “Improving development efficiency was our number one goal and Aldon helped make that happen. Not only have we improved application quality and delivery, the IT staff quickly embraced the new processes and are more productive as a result.”

About Aldon

Aldon is the ALM company for IT compliance. For over 25 years, we have been the experts in providing application lifecycle management solutions to ensure that change management, collaboration, and compliance are applied consistently across all areas of IT. Through our user-centric approach to process management, our service, change, and release management products help you focus on what you do best—providing superior services, rapidly developing applications, and efficiently managing your IT operations. Behind the scenes, we help you increase productivity, accelerate time-to-market, fully understand your IT assets, and easily achieve compliance with regulatory standards. A true testament to our products is our customer base with over 1,300 companies worldwide in over 70 of the Fortune 100. These companies rely upon our solutions to manage their global IT business and operations processes including application development, network operations, and services management. We are headquartered in Emeryville, California and have offices around the world serving more than 60 countries.

About Children's Mercy Family Health Partners

Owned by Children's Mercy Hospital and Clinics in Kansas City, Missouri, Children's Mercy Family Health Partners (CMFHP) is the only provider-owned, non-profit safety-net health plan in Kansas or Missouri. CMFHP provides low-cost or no-cost health care coverage through contracts with the Kansas HealthWave and MO HealthNet programs. CMFHP has more than a decade of experience and is the largest provider of managed care services to participants in Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (or “SCHIP”) in the State of Kansas and in the Kansas City, Missouri area. For more information please visit www.fhp.org.