"Visual WebGui allowed us to spend more time on providing a solution to our customer’s needs and less time on the technical details of web application development" --J. Patrick Vandersluis, Ph.D., CEO of HealthRx

Overview
HealthRx Corporation provides software solutions for healthcare, biomedical research, biosafety, and complex patient management.  Notable HealthRx customers include the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Business Needs
In 2002, HealthRx Corporation developed a rich-client solution for the NIH to catalogue and track all potentially hazardous materials used in the many institutes’ biomedical research.  The growing need for a web-based solution inspired HealthRx to fold this solution, then called the Potentially Hazardous Materials Information System (PHMIS), into their PI-Dashboard offering, an online biomedical research management tool.  HealthRx’s senior developer was the sole developer on the project that took six months to complete.  In early 2008, HealthRx decommissioned the rich-client product and introduced webPHMIS.

The Solution
When HealthRx decided to create its first web-based application, the development team spent thousands of dollars on a variety of technologies while searching for a tool to help building on the experience of the rich-client product.  It became clear that there was a significant difference between web sites and web applications, and that Visual WebGui was in a class by itself in allowing leveraging of virtually the entire PHMIS GUI and all of the business and data layers.  The users lost nothing in functionality they were used to yet have the convenience of a web product.

Using the Visual WebGui FormBox control, the webPHMIS application and a growing number of ported modules are served to the customer in a content management system that handles all of the ASP.NET security, membership and role needs of the organization.   “Developing in Visual WebGui is clear enough that our support team understands the back end of our system and how changes can be made.  That privilege is usually reserved for developers, and we are grateful for a tool that allows our support team members to see why webPHMIS functions as it does,” said Pat Walsh, HealthRx Project Manager for PI-Dashboard.

Benefits
"Visual WebGui allowed us to spend more time on providing a solution to our customer’s needs and less time on the arcane technical details of web development,” said J. Patrick Vandersluis, Ph.D., HealthRx’s CEO.  PI-Dashboard, the web-based tool in which webPHMIS lives, was HealthRx’s first foray into web application development.  This task was made possible by Visual WebGui’s intuitive design and abundant support.

Visual WebGui’s ease of use allowed HealthRx to develop the product quickly using only one senior developer.  In the past, projects of this type of undertaking would have taken twice the development time for one developer or would have required more than one full-time developer.  Prompt and helpful support from the Visual WebGui team assisted our developer and helped him continue work without spending hours researching questions or figuring out issues.