The rising number of lead poisoning cases among children of California has become a cause for concern in the last decade. The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has been mandated with the task of monitoring blood levels of lead poisoned children to ensure appropriate care management throughout county health departments.
Global Touchpoints as a trusted partner, helped modernize and transform the core systems that would eventually impact the Intake and Case Management of the Lead poisoned children of California.
Business Challenges
- Over 70,000 cases of child lead poisoning cases occur in the State of California. It is critical that these children get medical support and reports from the state immediately.
- Better functionalities within the system to eliminate duplicates and mistakes.
- Electronically process reported blood lead tests and disseminate the tests to local counties.
- Allow State and County personnel to share case management data in real time.
- Receive blood lead test results in the form of HL7 files from healthcare providers and laboratories.
- A system that would run “de-duplication” procedures on incoming records to determine duplicates and allow for manual processing if the record cannot be resolved.
Execution
The project was divided into two phases.
- Phase I – Re-design, development and installation of the new Electronic Blood Lead Reporting System (EBLR) system
- Phase II – Upgrade and migration of the existing Response and Surveillance System for Childhood Lead Exposures II (RASSCLE II) system
Response and Surveillance System for Childhood Lead Exposures II — RASSCLE II and Electronic Blood Lead Reporting System upgrade and migration. RASSCLE II is a data-centric case management system. RASSCLE II enables entering, storing, editing, and the reporting of, lead poisoning cases that happen to children in California.
WebCollect – EBLR system is meant to receive Blood Lead poisoning results from all over the state of California. Submitters to the EBLR system include Hospitals, Doctor’s offices, Clinical Labs and other organizations processing blood samples. The results are sent using the Health Level 7 format (HL7).
During this phase, after the analysis of the existing EBLR system, we determined that the legacy ASP platform with an aging architecture was not capable of satisfying the increasing requirements and secure handling of Protected Health Information (PHI). With lack of any documentation of the legacy system, our team reverse engineered the business layer of the existing application to identify the various business rules and validations.
Once the different modules of the EBLR system were developed, and tested, we made sure that the new system was able to seamlessly interface with external systems.
Soon after the GO-LIVE of the EBLR system, the Touchpoints team started to work on the modernization of the existing RASSCLE II system. We were able to successfully integrate both the systems to seamlessly receive blood lead test reports from across the State of California and process the Lead poisoning cases as appropriate.The modernization effort resulted in over 3000 uploads/week from over 1500 labs and hospitals across the state of California.
