Scaling Engineering to Meet Surging Demand
Clearwave is the most trusted patient engagement platform that improves profitability, productivity, and digital access for specialty practices, hospitals, and health systems. Their technology helps healthcare organizations simplify patient scheduling, expedite patient intake, automate insurance eligibility verification, and create true financial transparency.
As a leading technology platform for specialty practices, hospitals, and health systems, Clearwave experienced rapid growth. To improve the patient care experience and maintain its competitive edge, the company needed to shift its focus from legacy development and testing to speed, growth, and innovation.
However, their internal resource constraints had created significant roadblocks:
- Lack of skilled resources to further scale and meet growing demand
- Slow development of scheduling functionality
- Required maintenance and support for existing and new systems
- Over 5% email bounce rate, putting Clearwave’s AWS account at risk of being disabled
To overcome these obstacles, Clearwave needed a development partner that could provide a flexible, scalable, and highly skilled engineering squad to augment their existing team.
A Dedicated Engineering Squad for End-to-End Support
KMS Technology engaged as Clearwave’s strategic engineering partner, providing a comprehensive solution that included extended engineering teams, DevOps, automation, and support for acquisitions. Our goal was to become a seamless extension of the Clearwave team, taking on critical responsibilities to accelerate their delivery plan.
1. Ramping Up Independent Scrum Teams
To immediately boost development capacity, KMS established three fully independent Scrum teams. These teams took ownership of managing defects in Clearwave’s Agile management systems and developing new features, which significantly sped up the delivery plan to meet their roadmap. This structure increased throughput and reduced context switching, which helped the organization move faster without sacrificing quality.
We also created a performance dashboard with reports to count the number of email bounces. The team likewise maintained and supported Clearwave’s core product, source code, deployment scripts, and automation test scripts triggered at 1 AM per day. Nightly runs produced actionable reports for the next workday, which allowed the teams to fix issues before they reached customers.
2. Driving Critical Third-Party Integrations
The KMS team developed several new features involving complex third-party integrations. This included building seamless connections with BridgePay and ModMed for payments, as well as VSP for eligibility and authorization. These integrations expanded Clearwave’s capabilities and improved the user experience for providers and patients.
Our team helps sync all of their clinical data from multiple EHR systems that support different standards, including both FHIR and non-FHIR, into a unified data source. Additionally, we seamlessly integrate and extract valuable data from third-party services such as BridgePay, ModMed, and VSP.
3. Implementing a Robust DevOps and Automation Strategy
The KMS team utilized Selenium to build an automation framework that increased automation coverage, reduced manual effort, and improved CI/CD. We then used de-identified data for automated tests to protect PHI with test data management, creating and storing test plans and test cases in the test management system.
Moreover, Clearwave received our assistance in standardizing and implementing an enterprise strategy for DevOps through updated technical documents, status tracking, project plans, release plans, test strategies, and other documents within the Agile system. CI and CD pipelines were tuned for reliability and speed, infrastructure provisioning was documented, and monitoring and alerting practices were expanded so that engineering and operations shared a single, transparent view of system health.
4. Supporting Successful Acquisition
KMS represented Clearwave’s engineering team in front of vendor partners and took on the full responsibility of integrating the knowledge, code bases, and workload of newly acquired companies.
Our teams also managed maintenance and support for Clearwave’s core product, source code, and deployment scripts. Through this combination of disciplined delivery, thoughtful integration, and strong operational practices, KMS provided Clearwave with a dedicated engineering squad that supported the entire lifecycle from planning to production and helped the organization meet its strategic goals with confidence.
Delivering a Reliable Platform for Patients and Providers
The partnership with KMS Technology enabled Clearwave to break through its resource constraints and fundamentally transform its development capabilities. In pursuit of better healthcare delivery, Clearwave could finally shift its focus to growth and innovation, providing innovative solutions at a quicker pace for patients and practices.
The platform now supports over 54 million patients and 320 live clients, with integrations to over 900 payers for real-time eligibility checks. The enhancements and stability delivered by the KMS teams contributed to a 56% reduction in rejected claims for Clearwave’s customers.
By providing a flexible, scalable, and deeply integrated engineering squad, KMS Technology empowered Clearwave to focus on growth and solidify its position as a market leader in the patient engagement solution sector.