Achievements at Asterion

Asterion sells a computerized system for streamlining the medical referral and insurance claims processes. It consists of a suite of applications and utilities, databases, and a mainframe computer.

Applications programming

I wrote and maintained interactive applications that lead medical professionals through the complexities of the medical referral process.

I also wrote code libraries that abstracted common behavior from existing Asterion code, thus dramatically simplifying programming.

Internet GUI

My proudest achievement at Asterion was the Internet GUI.

Asterion’s application suite was text-based, being used on dumb terminals connected to a mainframe over a WAN. This situation was perceived as hurting sales and investment. (Nowadays, everybody wants Internet connectivity and pretty GUI’s.)

We didn’t have the time or resources to rewrite the product line, however. For several months, we didn’t know how to resolve this problem. Then I came up with a solution!

I designed and wrote an Internet thin client GUI.

The solution was to make simple changes in how the applications drew text to the screen and how they received keyboard information from the user. Instead of drawing text into a terminal, the application sent a message over the Internet to a thin client program running on the user’s PC, which would then display the text. I also wrote a unix daemon that mediated communication between the client and server.

The thin client was written in Java, so that it would be portable across platforms and would run in a web browser. Moreover, exactly the same executable was used in both the text-based and Internet sessions, so that the logic was exactly the same in both (many of Asterion’s customers preferred to continue to use the text-based system).

This project was seen as being pivotal in Asterion’s last two sales.

It also vastly simplified the distribution of the product. Each doctor’s office need only to point their web browser at a page on the Web!

Encryption

I oversaw the implementation of an encryption mechanism for communications between the Internet GUI client and the server.

In our efforts to comply with HIPAA regulations, we secured all communication of medical information. We achieved compliance of the Internet GUI by encrypting all communications through SSL.

Web programming

I also initiated effort to make all of Asterion’s product line accessible from the Web. As part of this project, I wrote CGI scripts to allow clients to set up databases by filling out forms in a web page. I also designed many web pages for this purpose.

These CGI scripts were written in a variety of languages, including Perl, C, shell script, and a home-grown reporting language.