CASMU is a medical institution with more than 255,000 members and a staff made up of 2,700 doctors and 3,400 other employees. It has decided to develop an Intranet in order to help customer service deal with the members' most frequently posed queries. This Intranet will allow access to helpful information in dealing with such queries, to a manual of the whole institution, and to all the corporate and service-related information.
The network is made up of 600 stations spread out across six branches, which have LAN networks and five doctors' offices located in the outskirts of the city, connected through Frame Relay links. CASMU's 20 secondary branches located inland will also access the information through the Intranet.
Systems that have been developed for different platforms coexist (Windows C/S Oracle; NetWare Btrieve; Intranet) in order to handle the complexity of the institution's operations.
CASMU first started working with applications developed on the Bull platform; then the DOS applications for networks (Novell) arrived, and finally at the beginning of the 90's the institution incorporated GeneXus - in the DOS version- and started developing client/server applications (Oracle). These coexist with applications that access Btrieve.
"When the Intranet was first developed, our idea was just to have the institution's on-line manual. For that, we needed to integrate not only the information in Oracle (generated from C/S applications), but also the information provided by Btrieve applications on Netware,"said Gerardo Abreu, CASMU's spokesperson in charge of GeneXus.
"We worked things out by using Web Services in order to access the information saved in Btrieve. Web services that are generated in Visual C++ with GeneXus call functions internally developed and establish communication between Btrieve and Oracle by using http and XML for the information exchange", Abreu explained.
"We are very satisfied with the functionality of Web Services, and because of that, we hope to migrate all the RPC calls -which are currently made through DCOM- to Web Services", he added.
The GeneXus applications, which are currently executed on the Intranet, have been generated with GeneXus 7.5, and handle doctors' information as well as restricted information and data related to decentralized appointments and to the institution's members.
Information on patient hospitalization and on special appointments held at the Central Clinic -visited by an average of more than 10,000 people per day- is on Btrieve.
Abreu mentioned that in the past, in order to access this information, users had to know how to use the Btrieve application, whereas nowadays they just push a button on the Intranet and the information is displayed in the browser. Moreover, among the advantages offered by this solution, he highlighted a much lower maintenance cost, which will be possible from the moment that it will no longer be necessary to reinstall versions in 600 machines. Furthermore, he stressed that when Btrieve applications are migrated, it will suffice to rewrite to the appropriate Web Service to quickly access the information.