HP ALM System Can Advance Healthcare IT

Healthcare Innovators

Hewlett Packard on Tuesday introduced the first unified system that unites and automates software applications and services across heterogeneous environments. The new system, HP executives say, can help healthcare organizations better manage their applications, cut costs and improve efficiency as they adopt electronic health records.

The new HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11, which was launched at the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain, will allow healthcare IT staff to automate the critical activities of modernizing software applications from requirements management to quality and performance. The system also automates the workflow processes within and across application teams, enforcing and accelerating best practices.

As healthcare delivery organizations move from paper-based systems to digitized medical records, and as demand among healthcare providers and patients grows for health related applications embedded in mobile phones and other telehealth devices, Mark Sarbiewski, vice president, Products, HP Software, told InformationWeek that the need for simplicity and application flexibility will be a powerful way to cut through the complexity that faces the healthcare industry.

"This announcement is significant for healthcare organizations because it can help with their application modernization initiatives, such as updating to electronic medical records," Sarbiewski said. "As healthcare organizations rely on applications to perform business-critical functions, HP ALM 11 will allow them to gain control over complex processes, accelerate the delivery of applications, lower application costs and achieve business alignment without sacrificing quality."

Executives at healthcare information technology vendor, McKesson Corporation, have used previous versions of HP ALM to help lower costs and free up resources for new applications and services.

Todd Eaton, director, ALM Tools and Services, McKesson, noted that multiple requirements and tests, running across different platforms and coupled with new technologies can significantly affect application quality.

"Implementing HP application modernization solutions across the entire lifecycle helped us realize savings of several million dollars over a three-year period," Eaton said in a statement.

Healthcare Innovators

For business analysts, quality assurance (QA) analysts, security professionals, developers and others operating in the healthcare industry, using the HP ALM 11 can help them take advantage of the equal status given to other stakeholders in the software development life cycle (SDLC) process.

"We're not tied to a particular operating system or development environment-instead we're stack-agnostic and this is a huge differentiator from the other solutions in the market," Sarbiewski said.

HP ALM 11 is a role-based system that supports stakeholders in the applications delivery process and integrates with major development tools. Benefits include:

-- HP ALM 11 Project Planning and Tracking establishes release criteria and manages milestones throughout the process based on real-time visibility into release progress and readiness.

-- Three-way traceability between requirements, development and quality artifacts for rapid team-wide analysis and execution of application changes.

-- Flexible methodology support to optimize delivery approach by project type - waterfall, custom, Agile - with HP Agile Accelerator 4.0, available in a complimentary basic edition or advanced edition for a fee.

-- Lower enterprise risk from application failures due to functional, performance and security defects in composite and rich internet applications.

-- Reduced costs and delivery time with easy discovery, re-use and sharing of critical application artifacts, including requirements, tests and defects.

"All healthcare organizations rely on applications to deliver innovation for their business and therefore HP ALM 11 is targeted at the entire healthcare market," Sarbiewski said. "In the healthcare industry software is enormously important, both in the device side of healthcare and in IT systems for hospitals and providers. It's hard to name an industry where it's more important to get it right. In healthcare it has to be flawless."