Orders of Magnitude Growth
Dymeng was brought into a Brooklyn-based early-stage startup to develop customized platforms for the innovative mental health care company. Starting small and building some basic systems to handle their core needs for clinical management, over ten years Dymeng continued to be a trusted solutions partner, ultimately evolving their then-simple clinical management system into an enterprise-grade software ecosystem able to support services in 25 states across the nation, as well as a proprietary Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system for their internal use, and finally bringing the EMR and clinical management modules to market as a product.
About the Client
Our client, a then-startup based out of Brooklyn, NY, specializes in at-home services for children requiring mental health therapy. A relatively small operation when Dymeng joined as a solutions partner, they had a network of approximately 100 providers around the greater NYC area and have since grown to a network of nearly 30,000 nationwide providers. In addition to the core home-based care business model, through the years the client has seized opportunities to bring their clinical expertise to dedicated center-based care and specialty schools; at the time of writing, they are geared to bring their proprietary systems to market as a leasable product.
Challenges & Solutions
The client has faced numerous technical challenges and shifting objectives in their journey from an initial startup to a hardened corporation. Some highlights, listed generally in the order of their appearance, include:
- Insurance and Authorization management, Fraud Prevention
- Billing and Payroll Processes, Automations & Integrations
- Additional Common Business Challenges & Solutions
- Scaling of Systems
Insurances, Authorizations & Fraud Prevention
The Challenge
The client required a system for detailed insurance and authorization tracking, and ensuring adherence to those constraints. A logistically difficult scenario due to the constant changes in insurance rules, and the variances by carrier and state. In addition, some means of preventing fraudulent service entries from providers was needed.
The Solution:
With our ability to recognize core business needs and the flexibility required by a complex rule-based constraint system, Dymeng was able to engineer a robust software platform for managing these needs. This included comprehensive insurance and authorization tracking systems as well as full-scope service validations and flagging of problematic service providers. With the core system in place, this exists through years of use with only minor configuration-based adjustments needed for the evolving constraints of insurance companies. The software was designed at the start to be highly maintainable, scalable, and allow ease of evolution for future needs.
Billing & Payroll Processes, Automations & Integrations
The Challenge:
The handling of bulk payroll and billing needs based on services rendered were critical areas requiring high throughput and high levels of accuracy. The core data is generated through their proprietary systems, while billing and payroll are sent to third-party providers. The problem called for a solution that could handle bulk data movement through various systems, both internal and external while attaining high integrity and operational efficiency.
The Solution:
Dymeng was able to help shape the overall process requirements, fitting them into a short time window of operation while considering the various checks and balances required to ensure accurate payroll handoff and minimal billing rejections. With the process defined, our automation experience and ability to integrate with other systems cinched the flow and now allows for high-volume processing in a quick-turn cycle time.
Common Business Problems & Solutions
In a recurring theme of the previously mentioned challenges, over a near-ten-year period, the client was faced with any number of common business problems. Unique staffing needs, utilization and scheduling, quality control, communications, et cetera are all common types of problems faced. Dymeng was able to build technology support, utilizing an appropriate mix of SaaS products, custom-developed solutions, and integrations to make it all work together.
Business Intelligence & Analytics
The Challenge:
As systems evolved and the company scaled, there became a strong need for business insights and reporting across multiple disparate systems. Lacking a centralized data platform and an interactive reporting and analytics system, the client needed something to fill this gap and provide them with the intelligence needed to confidently make high-level business decisions.
Our Solution:
Dymeng proposed and implemented a comprehensive data centralization platform and analytics system, using data across the entire ecosystem of both internal and external systems. Our first task was to establish a data warehouse, where all the data from various places could live in a single place, cleaned, correlated, and ready for reporting. We then began defining and implementing data pipelines and the automations required to bring the data from the generational sources into the warehouse. We cleaned and transformed it so the warehouse contents remained a client base to run advanced analytics. With the data platform in place and analytics systems implemented, we placed a robust and user-friendly visualization tool on top. Ultimately, the client was able to hire its own internal analysts to utilize the system to its full extent, gaining access to high-integrity data from various systems to answer some of the company’s most difficult “Where does this stand?” and “What if we do this?” type questions.
Scaling of Services
The Challenges:
Scaling is the name of the game here. The considerable challenge was to handle growth through orders of magnitude while maintaining system stability, resilience, and throughput balanced with cost constraints. This was especially challenging to ensure that longer-term investments in infrastructure were started early enough to be effective when needed while balancing the many future unknowns that need to be factored into the ability for the system to evolve.
Our Solution:
Core technical architecture planning has always been a strong point for us, and we put it to excellent use in this case. Our ability to recognize potential scaling bottlenecks early enough to address them before they become critical offered our client a smooth growth path without being held back while waiting for major changes to unlock forward momentum. What started as a single server running a few web portals for core business operations has since evolved into a multi-faceted ecosystem running on state-of-the-art infrastructure platforms with auto-scaled services, including full disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
Aside from the core architecture preemptive planning and evolutionary capability, Dymeng also implemented highly robust monitoring, tracing, and alerting systems sufficient to recognize potential system operation issues and address them before they become mission-critical outages.
Results
What began as a relatively small clinical management project for our client has, over ten years, grown into a highly capable technology ecosystem of various web and mobile applications, backend processing, data management, and infrastructure services sufficient to allow for growth in orders of magnitude and the introduction of multiple business lines.
Currently, the client is preparing the systems and products developed for their own internal use to bring to market for others to make use of, utilizing a modular service composition method to deliver customized solutions to the market. Dymeng continues to be the trusted solutions partner in this next phase of their impressive business story.
