On-Line Patient Bill

Jefferson Regional Medical Center
Pine Bluff, AR USA

The On-Line Patient Bill application was developed for the Jefferson Regional Medical Center, located in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. As the fourth largest hospital in the state, Jefferson Regional serves over 280,000 residents of 11 counties in the region. Its physicians, health-care professionals and care-team members work together to provide Pine Bluff and South Arkansas families with leading care. JRMC is a not-for-profit, private regional hospital, licensed for 471 beds by the Arkansas State Health Department. JRMC is accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations

Patients can login to the application to access account information.

The application allows hospital patients to access their personal billing information. By logging into this application, a user can access their personal profile, review outstanding bills, make payments via credit card, and access their insurance coverage information.

Patients log in to the application with their names and passwords. If they do not know their password, they can request it by simply clicking on the "Lost Password" button, and an email containing this information will be sent to them. Once logged in, the patient can update their billing information and change their login password. Patients can also submit payments to selected accounts via credit card and check on the status of insurance coverage for each claim.

Credit card payments are accepted online.

Application size and scope

The application accesses two Microsoft SQL Server databases with 17 database tables and 16 Web pages. The largest table contains just over 2,000,000 records. Each month, hundreds of patients access the application which processes approximately 300,000 transactions a month.

The project

I built the On-Line Patient Bill application in three months. I spent six weeks of this time researching, training, and learning how to use Iron Speed Designer. I developed a prototype application during this time and later rebuilt it from scratch after having learned more about the tool.

Code extensions and customizations

I wrote several code customizations, including:

	E-mail notifications
	Lost password function
	Security Authentication
	Calculations and totals
	Audit trail

Surprisingly, I only had to write around 1,000 lines of code for the entire application. I was able to accomplish this in just two days!

Layout customizations

I built a custom theme tailored to match the color and style of Jefferson Regional Medical Center's existing website.

Account summary page in On-Line Bill application.

Iron Speed Designer impact

I saved at least six months of development time using Iron Speed Designer, if not more. I built this application in my spare time using Iron Speed Designer, and I believe I saved the total cost to hire a full-time .NET developer. Our organization could not have completed the project without Iron Speed Designer. We do not have the resources for development and there was absolutely no allocated budget to outsource the project.

Next steps

There are no current plans to extend the On-Line Bill Pay application. However, we will be adding the application to our outpatient surgery center in the future. We continue to use Iron Speed Designer for development work whenever there is a good fit.

About the developer

Mike holds a BS in Computer Sciences and specializes in RPG programming in iSeries machines. His background in programming has been RPG on an AS400. He is not a .NET or Visual Basic developer, although he has been developing for the last 24 years.