March 9, 2009

AO Develops Web Service to Connect External Health Plan Data to Hospital Website.

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March 9, 2009

Grand Rapids, MI – Continuing to grow its presence in the healthcare field, Atomic Object today announced its work in a web service project connecting two of the area’s recognized healthcare innovators.

Health system Spectrum Health and health plan Priority Health are both recognized nationally for the care and services they provide. Spectrum Health was among the first in the country to post average prices for many of its common procedures on its Web site, and it recently added information on average reimbursement from Medicare, Medicaid and commercial health insurers for those procedures. Spectrum Health has now taken these efforts one step further by introducing a publicly available, web-based cost estimator available for 250 of the procedures it offers.

When Spectrum Health and Priority Health decided to factor health plan coverage into this out-of-pocket cost estimator tool, they contracted Atomic Object. Working in concert with both organizations, AO created the secure web service connecting Spectrum Health’s web calculator to Priority Health’s health plan account system. With this web service, users of the calculator have the option to enter Priority Health account information and thus subtract their health plan coverage from expense estimates.

The challenge here was not the programming to create the web service itself. Rather, Atomic Object helped Spectrum Health and Priority Health establish a template for publishing and consuming secure, interoperable web services today and in the future. The two organizations used wholly different platforms for this project (Microsoft and Java, respectively) yet now have a defined process to deploy web service security, certificates, and authentication in a standards-compliant and platform-agnostic manner.

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Atomic Object Contact:

Carl Erickson
+1 616 776 6020
CarlErickson@atomicobject.com

About Atomic Object

Atomic Object builds ridiculously good custom software for startups, huge companies, and everyone in-between. A pioneer and expert in agile development practices, Atomic teams have delivered the highest quality software, on-time and on-budget, since 2001. We complement our expert development capabilities with crackerjack project management and user experience design services. Our projects span a broad range of technologies, from web and desktop to embedded and operating systems.