The Challenge
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW), a long-term GovWebworks client, required an update to their Partner Data Access Portal (PDAP), originally developed by our team. The application is used by Idaho medical providers and vendors, such as hospitals and social service organizations, to manage their affiliations and verify patient and beneficiary benefit coverage and eligibility. Benefits include Medicaid, SMAP, TAFI, APTC, AABD Cash, and Child Care. The agency wished to update security compliance and reduce risks, while maintaining service continuity for end users, including hospitals and social service organizations. The project needed to meet strict deadlines and ensure minimal disruption to user experience while maintaining functionality.
Our Approach
GovWebworks provided IDHW and the PDAP project with a small agile team of dedicated developers and fractional resources for quality assurance, user experience design, and project management. The project scope focused on updates to the React interface technology while excluding modernization of the Java backend. We adopted a technology stack similar to IDHW’s idalink application to save time and costs, ensuring compliance and longevity of over eight years. We also conducted manual functional and regression testing across major browsers as well as performance, penetration, and security testing. We coordinated user acceptance testing (UAT) with DHW participants and provided post-launch production support for two weeks. Out of scope for this project were mobile device and legacy desktop browser support beyond the current and previous versions, and design or functionality enhancements.
The Result
Our approach allowed IDHW to efficiently modernize their Medicaid provider application, ensuring security and functionality while minimizing costs and disruptions to end users. The React-based interface maximizes compatibility with contemporary web browsers. Utilizing free and open-source software, the update also saved taxpayer money by extending the application’s usable life more than eight years without costly business process changes. The application meets performance and modern security standards, minimizing risks of breaches, and the user experience maintains familiar workflows to ease adoption for citizens and reduce training burdens for agency staff. The implementation of the React-based frontend modernization was completed on time and on budget.
