The business issue

Established by Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, Versant Advantage, Inc. is a non-profit public benefit corporation developed in response to the severe national shortage of experienced nurses. Designed by nurses for nurses, Versant aimed to become the leading provider of integrated, evidence-based programs that assist hospitals and healthcare organizations with strategically stabilizing their RN workforce while optimizing financial performance. The delivery and management of standardized, evidence-based workforce development programs, though, becomes a great challenge when faced with the reality of disconnected, unevenly developed and, in many cases, literally archaic IT environments. SystemArts was approached to develop and deploy a solution that can ensure the delivery of a rich and sophisticated learning and management environment across disparate IT infrastructures consistently and reliably.

Our approach

Traditionally, applications have been developed and implemented to support and perform in on-premises client-server environments that rely on dedicated IT resources for maintenance and enhancements. This model though, introduces incremental strain with each additionally implemented application on already stretched IT resources and becomes a success inhibitor in the case of dynamic, content driven systems that require centralized management of standardized processes and workflows across multiple locations. An alternative to this model is the immerging Application Service Provider approach which can deliver most of the functionality of traditional client-server applications but with little to no involvement of any IT resources. This model requires very little IT infrastructure or upfront investment and presents the opportunity to deliver a consistent user experience across disparate IT environments.

How it worked

• Security
  
  

  With its resources shared by multiple facilities, an ASP solution presents unique and challenging access control and traceability requirements. To meet them Versant Voyager relies on a role based security system based on a customized ASP.NET Membership and a proprietary auditing schema. Together, these two modules provide a secure environment with a complete historical record of all actions and their outcomes.

  
  
• Management
  
  

  At the core of the Versant Voyager is a powerful and extremely flexible Content Management system that allows numerous types of content to be created, owned and managed at a variety of levels. It allows for structures to be created at one level and partially or completely customized or varianced at a lower level. The characteristics of the Content Management system provide Versant with a rigid platform to distribute their standardized content and at the same handle specific requirements unique to a particular facility.

  
  
• Scheduling
  
  

  Along with the Content Management system, Versant Voyager also offers a sophisticated Scheduling system that allows a variety of events and activities to be managed and organized in an intuitive manner. Each event type carries a unique set of attributes and adheres to a specific set of access control rules. The Scheduling system is tightly integrated with the Messaging and Notification system so events can spawn automatic notifications based on predefined conditions.