Improving Health Care Amidst a Pandemic

Garima Maheshwari

Contact: LinkedIn

For my capstone this past summer, I had the opportunity to work at Premera Blue Cross as a Software Developing Intern. Premera Blue Cross is one of the biggest healthcare providers in Washington State and strives to improve the lives of their customers, by making healthcare work better. Amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, they continue to work towards this mission. During this internship, I was part of a scrum team on the Custom Data Exchange team, that develops backend services in order to automate the processing of crucial customer data such as health claims. Along with assisting the scrum team in completing product backlog items, attending mobbing sessions, and shadowing the different roles within the team, I also simultaneously worked on a project.

In this project, I was tasked to redesign and refactor a customer payment data file processing program from Visual Basic into C#. Some of the areas of improvement for this program that my team wanted me to focus on, included refactoring it into C# in order to utilize the packages and efficiencies available. I was also asked to implement a solution to a constraint that only allowed the program to process one input file with a single time and date stamp. The most important area of improvement was designing the program to make it more maintainable for easier future development.

I went through the iterative development process from redesigning to deployment, so that I could address all the opportunities for improvement. Before redesigning, I learned about Premera’s different environments including the way customer data was organized, secured, and transferred. In addition to that, I focused on learning about tools such as Azure DevOps, UDeploy, Beyond Compare, and Visual Studio in order to aid me when I would later implement and test the program. Later, when redesigning the program, I used OOP techniques and C# packages available such as Log4Net to write code that was modular and easy to debug. I shadowed test and software engineers on the team to understand how integration testing worked while deploying code to Premera’s various test environments.

After successful testing, this program now runs in Premera’s production environment where it processes payment files almost every day. This internship not only allowed me to work on something that was meaningful, but also gave me the opportunity to integrate myself into the agile environment at Premera.