CASE STUDIES

Continuing Education HeadQuarters Mobile (CEHQ)

Mobile Case Study

Background
The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is the largest teaching hospital in the United States. Genova has partnered with the University of Iowa Healthcare to produce an innovative approach to delivering CE (continuing education) credits to nurses at the point of care. The result of this partnership is CE Headquarters.

The original funding for this product was the result of winning an SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) grant. The University of Iowa and Genova Technologies own the patent on the business process for Point of Care Continuing Education.

Original Challenge
The purpose of this activity is to provide structured, self-directed, online learning for nurses on a variety of topics related to health care. The educational objectives are to identify needs, complete relevant background research on a clinical question, reinforce clinical decisions through the examination of published evidence, learn new facts related to clinical practice, and translate that knowledge into improved health care outcomes.

Today’s technology and access to the Internet have made medical information available to health care providers and their patients with a click of the mouse. Many medical databases and websites are updated daily with peer-reviewed articles and the most current information available. Some medical books and journals are now readily accessible online. The process of gathering and communicating information has drastically evolved and advanced in the past ten years.

CE Headquarters has developed a system that allows access to online health resources that have been reviewed for reliability and validity. This program allows nurses to address patient concerns with the most up to date information, automatically records data for continuing education credit, and generates a credit letter by an approved Board of Nursing.

CE Headquarters (CEHQ) is an application developed by Genova Technologies that allows medical professionals to earn and track continuing education credits while researching topics on selected websites (e.g. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or American Cancer Society).

CEHQ consists of a web-based portal running in the cloud for desktop clients. In addition to supporting desktop users, Genova’s mobile development team has developed iOS and Android applications for CEHQ available in the app stores. The mobile version of CEHQ consists of a hybrid application that uses web services to communicate with the CEHQ server.

CEHQ Mobile was built utilizing Genova’s full-lifecycle product development capabilities. Requirements capture, analysis, design, development, testing, and deployment/distribution through the app stores were all completed by Genova’s in-house team. Genova completed the project using a hybrid methodology that incorporates Agile and Iterative principles.

Team Composition
The Genova team worked with groups of nurses and nurse educators to determine their requirements, and then designed and built CE Headquarters. Genova also worked with the Iowa Board of Nursing to ensure that the new system would meet its guidelines.

Responsibilities
• Requirements
• Design
• Reviews, (Code, Design)
• Development
• Testing, (unit, user)
• Deployment to test server
• Deployment to production
• Training

Drupal CMS
The Content Management System Drupal is used for the web interface as well as the ease of implementation of users, roles, and permissions. This allows our nurse subject matter experts to create learning content and have the data retrieved in various web services to mobile users. It holds all data related to user accounts, credits, websites, and other CEHQ activities.

AWS
Various Amazon Web Services are used and the architecture allows for high availability as well as long-term storage of data and certificates.

Links
myCEHQ website
CEHQ for iOS
CEHQ for Android