When Brett Michalak took the job of CIO for Crescent Healthcare last spring, he confronted a set of homegrown applications which were built in the early 1990s and slowing down the company's pharmaceutical services, reports CIO magazine's Kevin Fogarty. Michalak's challenge was to move this ancient system into a cloud-based environment to improve the efficiency, usability and reliability of the operations.

Doctors, patients, hospitals and insurance companies all need up-to-date data on Crescent's services and patient status, and the decades-old applications, accessible via dumb terminals weren't cutting it. Many of the applications had to be replaced so that the expenses and logistics surrounding drugs, treatments, equipment and caregivers' time could be better managed. Last summer, Michalak embarked on updating Crescent's infrastructure, and he started by evaluating the legacy systems to determine how well they could be replicated with services from Salesforce.com. 

"The original intent was to do all the development with a cloud based solution to get the cost and efficiency benefits available there and a path to other initiatives," Michalak said. "It turned out there was a certain percentage of business processes that could be handled through a specific cloud environment, while others created some challenges for us."

The company had to clean up all of its data so that it could be used in commercial applications, and it began by building a data warehouse. After deploying Salesforce.com to automate the business applications, it installed some BI functionality for the benefit of marketing and operations.

"The initial approach was to do a full Force.com development, but as we moved through that we had to make some adjustments based on specific requirements that didn't quite fit the cloud plan," Michalak told CIO.

For more:
- see Kevin Fogarty's article at CIO

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