MEDCOM’s Deputy Chief of Staff for the Army Recovery and Care Program is the leading proponent for the evaluation and treatment of wounded, ill, and injured soldiers through a comprehensive, soldier-centric process of medical care, rehabilitation, and personal and professional development.

ARCP’s Army Recovery and Care System (ARCS) is a customized, integrated, multi-role care management system that assists care provider teams and wounded soldiers during their transition back into the force or into veteran status.

TIAG was tasked with streamlining burdensome provider workflows and designing customized, user-friendly features by fusing human-centered design (HCD) user research and design practices within established development processes. Because ARCS is a robust multi-role system, we first wanted to establish an HCD phased approach to prioritize workflows and customized feature sets with the ARCP stakeholders and providers. Next, we identified a curated set of user research methods and design techniques to capture all health provider pain points in their workflows and task needs. In parallel to the design process, we used “Tech Checks” – essentially technical reality checks – to evaluate the technical feasibility and requirements of the designs. Finally, we were able to establish a tailored HCD strategic approach by conducting usability testing with ARCP providers to measure ease of use, time-on-task, and overall provider satisfaction.

Using our HCD approach, TIAG evaluated, unraveled and redesigned task management processes, workflow, and feature sets to optimize ARCS function and flow. As a result, we reduced key workflows and task management processes by up to 50%. A recent survey of 231 ARCP providers revealed that the top two most liked workflow and feature enhancements were the provider dashboard and the revised soldier assessment survey designs. Tackling these areas relieved the burden and cognitive load for many ARCP providers and increased overall satisfaction.

The mission of the U.S. Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) Deputy Chief of Staff for Warrior Care and Transition (DCS, WCT) is to oversee, integrate, and synchronize policy, advocacy, and execution for warrior care initiatives and the Army Wounded Warrior Program. The Army Recovery Care Program (ARCP) evaluates and treats wounded, ill and injured soldiers through a comprehensive, soldier-centric process of medical care, rehabilitation, and professional and personal development.

In order to leverage technology to better support the needs and experiences of the wounded, ill, and injured soldiers in their system, the WCT needed to rethink how they approached the IT, cybersecurity, and enterprise-related requirements inherent in establishing and growing a medical organization. Our challenge was to understand the process and doctrine as it was being developed and then to support and scale it in a way that was useful to track the health, wellness, and transitions of the 20,000 warriors in the system.

TIAG’s on-site team served as critical contributors to the mission by providing project management and technical advisory and development services. We were the central coordination point for contracted activities and managed all internal projects, working directly with both the CIO and CMIO to advance the clinical IT priorities of the organization We worked closely with clinical and non-clinical SMEs (nurse case managers, occupational therapists, social workers, etc.) to design surveys and assessment tools that could be automated and used to proactively monitor ARCP’s wounded, ill, and injured soldier population. Our goal was to ensure the data was easy to manipulate and leverage across all users. On a local and individual level, an individual squad leader or clinical practitioner would have the ability to view all necessary components, but at an aggregate level, leaders could see how many soldiers were reporting as high risk, dealing with pain issues, rehabilitating, and more.

We were able to help WTC navigate and identify the best use of technology. Taking this approach and direction on the adoption of new technologies was fundamental to growing WTC’s IT portfolio and infrastructure. Because of this detailed understanding and cooperation, we were able to vastly improve the command’s ability to track every soldier’s progress – advancing their mission to fully support the U.S. Army’s ill and wounded warriors and their families.

The Army Recovery Care Program (ARCP), previously known as Warrior Care and Transition (WCT), evaluates and treats wounded, ill, and injured soldiers through a comprehensive, soldier-centric process of medical care, rehabilitation, and personal and professional development.

ARCP needed to consolidate various Information Management and Information Technology (IM/IT) systems to support its direct reporting units, requiring the modernization of the Army Warrior Care and Transition System (AWCTS).

TIAG utilized best practices from across the software industry to develop the AWCTS release-cycle. We implemented tools and techniques such as code reviews, triage meetings, and code styling guides to achieve a baseline level of quality and standardize source code. Once each release was internally verified, we completed a formal UAT including a suite of regression tests in a pre-production environment managed by the same DoD hosting provider that hosts the production system.

Our approach to AWCTS software delivery preserved the key tenets of its agile methodology. This enabled the support team to successfully deliver a well-tested, deployment-ready release package for every scheduled deployment window since contract inception.

The U.S. Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) Deputy Chief of Staff for Army Recovery Care Program (DCS, ARCP) is the lead proponent for the Army Recovery Care Program (ARCP). Their mission is to provide high-quality, soldier-centric case management to the U.S. Army’s Wounded, Ill, and Injured soldiers. Their complex and comprehensive medical care includes rehabilitation, professional development, and personal resilience.

The Army Warrior Care and Transition System (AWCTS) is an integrated, web-based IM/IT application that allows for seamless information sharing between modules for user accessibility. It is the U.S. Army’s singular case management system and is integral to supporting Ill and Wounded warriors throughout their care and transition back into the force or veteran status. AWCTS needed to be modernized, and the ARCP contracted TIAG to help them with the necessary research, customized development, testing, and training.

TIAG was responsible for the entire infrastructure surrounding AWCTS, including establishing, maintaining, and enhancing all development and test environments. One of the first actions we took was implementing the Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service system and moving to the cloud. Without the constraining requirements of physically housing multiple servers, we were able to more precisely reproduce the production environment, which allowed us to rapidly deploy a development and user preview environment with little overhead. Further, since several of these environments are utilized for scheduled test and integration activities, there was no longer a need for the ARCP to fully provision the machines to run all the time. They are able to adjust quickly to periods of heavy use and ensure stable performance by adding more CPU or memory.

Not being limited to physical hardware allowed us to creatively approach how we supported the AWCTS. The ability to dynamically deploy images as needed gives the ARCP the flexibility to quickly meet special development testing requirements. Implementing new software releases and certifying their functionality are now seamless and do not impact the development environment or require any additional hardware. Additionally, our solution significantly reduced device and hardware failure, virtually eliminated maintenance time and costs, and allowed technical personnel to focus on optimization efforts.