Bellevue College is a student-centered, comprehensive, and innovative college that advances the life-long educational development of its students while strengthening the economic, social, and cultural life of its diverse community. The college promotes student success by providing high-quality, flexible, accessible educational programs and services; advancing pluralism, inclusion, and global awareness; and acting as a catalyst and collaborator for a vibrant region.

According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, academic access to Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems represented a key barrier nationally to workforce development in the Health IT (HIT) sector. Bellevue College was awarded an $11.8 million grant from the Department of Labor (DOL) to lead a geographically dispersed, nine-college consortium in developing and implementing an HIT training curriculum. This grant could enable them to not only develop and pilot new EMR system approaches for academic use, but to create a repeatable process and curriculum that could be replicated nationally.

We deployed our top resources and created on-demand instances of EMR products for each college and course. In addition, we leveraged Amazon Web Services to deliver hosted virtual desktops to simplify the configuration and usage of the EMR legacy “fat-clients” across all student operating systems and devices. We backed up this delivery mechanism with a robust tier 1–3 service desk and a quality control plan designed to be responsive to both faculty and student needs.

By collaborating with the college, we were able to deliver tailored software solutions from the enterprise level down to the desktop level across the consortium of colleges in less than a month.

The USUHS is a worldwide center of excellence for military and public health professions’ education and research. USUHS’s mission is to train, educate, and prepare uniformed services health professionals, officers, and leaders to directly support the Military Health System, the National Security and National Defense Strategies of the United States, and the readiness of our armed forces.

USUHS’s network and data center were outdated to the point that they could no longer meet cybersecurity accreditation requirements. Creating a secure, state-of-the-art network environment required remediating 2,500 computer systems and 45 servers for the university and migrating all computer systems and servers to a new domain and hybrid cloud infrastructure – all while providing normal operational IT support to the university with no impact to end users.

TIAG conducted in-depth interviews with each clinical department to build an interlaced educational support web of applications, systems, and business processes. Once we had a complete understanding of the USUHS environment, we designed a systematic transformation strategy that served as a project roadmap.This included designing and deploying a completely new VLAN architecture for the entire network. We then virtualized old legacy systems and consolidated all USUHS servers into a designated network operations center server room. From there, we completed full documentation on the USUHS IM/IT environment, including systems, applications, and mission critical websites and designed, implemented, and migrated USUHS’s assets to a new .edu network and hybrid Google cloud environment.

The culmination of this effort led to the migration of more than 2,000 personal data repositories, all departmental shared drives, 45 applications, and 5,000 gigabytes of data, all with very little impact and work time outages for the end user. We also provided a more open collaborative environment with teaching universities and organizations and facilitated the hybrid cloud modernization of the USUHS IM/IT environment. At the close of the project, our team was given an award for “exceptional project management, technical coordination, business process consultation, and exemplary user support.” 

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.