Iron Shrimp is Dead...Long Live Iron Shrimp!

In a dynamic organization, reorganizations are inevitable.  As people come and go and leadership strives to optimize the value of existing resources, change is inevitable.  So, when the team on which I began my career here at MSIS, Iron Shrimp, was disbanded, I went with the flow.  However, the products we supported live on.  One of those products is the Psychiatric Inpatient Application or PIA.

PIA was an experiment in doing agile development right.  We took on the project for UMHS because they didn't have the bandwidth to do it for their client.  It gave us an opportunity to allow the team to pick the development platform and use test driven development.  By all accounts, the effort was a whopping success.

Through three different project managers, the team managed to develop a product that the product owner finds to be spot on!  He has told me on several occasions that he plans to talk about how this application has changed his world at various symposia throughout the country.   Before they had PIA, which runs on an iPad, caregivers would check critical patients every 30 minutes unless there was a specific reason to monitor them more closely.  This was the best they could do with their paper system.

By reorganizing the data on each patient on a single screen, we have enabled them to check EVERY patient at 15 minute intervals 24/7/365.  They simply cannot do this without PIA.  Data for the application is collected from CareLink.  However, today we will be switching it to pull data from the new MiChart (Epic) system.  It also pushes data back into the patient's MiChart medical record.  This is also something that was not done prior to PIA.

Although Iron Shrimp no longer exists as a team; Ed, Bennett, Dan and I remain deFacto members. Oh, and as for the development of the application:  the users have been relying on it for over five months now.  Number of support requests? One...and it was a user training issue.  Long live Iron Shrimp!  Three cheers for test driven iterative development with full product owner participation.