Summary
Philadelphia Corporation for Aging (PCA) is a non-profit agency established in 1973 to serve as the Area Agency on Aging for Philadelphia. Its mission is to improve the quality of life for older and disabled Philadelphians by assisting them in achieving optimum levels of good health, independence and productivity.

PCA receives it funds, in part, from the Older Americans Act and the Pennsylvania Lottery through the Pennsylvania Department of Aging under Act 70.

The Problem/Opportunity
PCA needed to replace the Data General Mainframe in existence since 1980. Approximately 500 users accessed the system on a daily basis. The software application, written in COBOL consisted of roughly 3 million lines of code. The system was slow with constant crashes and downtime. More importantly, the old technology did not accommodate the growing list of enhancement requests made to the IT department. This resulted in an application backlog of at least 1-year. Also, PCA had a strong desire to eliminate the expensive annual maintenance cost.

The charter was to replace the Data General with a new integrated software system based on Client/Server and Web Based Technology. This involved the selection of a set of software tools that would drastically reduce application backlog and dramatically improve system response time. The goal was for the new improved system to ease the burden of the already overworked social workers and in the end improve the lives of the elderly of Philadelphia. By streamlining data entry and providing instantaneous results to complex queries, PCA employees could serve more people with less effort.

Developing the Solution
The system was completely redesigned and reengineered using primarily Visual Basic 6.0, Active Server Pages, IIS 4.0 and Oracle 7.x. The system employed the use of many custom ActiveX controls and Crystal Reports. The reengineered system consists of the following modules: Provider and Consumer Demographic Maintenance, Call Intake, Care Planning/Costing, Provider Budgeting/Billing, Waiting List Management, Departmental Workflow, Assessment Scheduling, 170+ Crystal Reports and a Data Warehousing module for reporting statistical information to the State of Pennsylvania. Web-enabled portions, developed in Microsoft Active Server Pages, include Human Resource and Provider Billing functions. The Accounting modules which includes General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable were moved to PeopleSoft. A complex interface to PeopleSoft's General Ledger and Accounts Payable was also developed.

Technical Solution
The new Windows-based system was developed using a 3-Tier approach. It runs on Microsoft NT Client and Compaq Proliant 8000 NT Server. The software consists of approximately 380 Visual Basic Forms, 400 Database Procedures and 50 Business Objects. The system delivers sub-second response time to over 300 concurrent users and interfaces with approximately 300 service providers on a daily basis.

Business Benefits

• The system delivers sub-second response time to over 300 concurrent users and interfaces with approximately 300 external service providers on a daily basis.
• Ease the burden of the already overworked social workers allowing for the improved care of the elderly.
• Increase the caseload of the PCA employees since many tasks usually performed by the social workers was now automated.
• Able to respond to new enhancements in a timely manner through the use of modern tools and techniques using Visual Basic, Oracle, ASP and Crystal Reports.
• Reduced the processing time of 70 statistical reports (Program Financial Reports) to the State of Pennsylvania from two weeks to 1 hour.
• Streamlining the processing of monthly assessment reports to the State of Pennsylvania by prompting the users for the information as they were completing other tasks. This eliminated the old system's requirement to enter the same information repeatedly.
• Eliminated the Data General's annual maintenance contract.
• Automated the manual entry of services for service providers using a Web interface whereby services and deliveries were entered thus reducing days of laborious manual data entry.
• The ability for any users to run reports and queries which was not available in the DG.
• Elimination of data-entry errors through the enforcement of complex business rules.