MELBOURNE, Fla. & WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Harris Corporation (NYSE:HRS), an international communications and information technology company, has been awarded a one-year, $1.2 million contract to help the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Eligibility Center reduce the costs, errors and time involved in making health benefits decisions.
Harris will design and develop the Business Rules Repository (BRR), which will offer a more flexible, streamlined alternative than the current solution. The BRR will help the Center streamline and migrate enrollment and eligibility business rules to an extensible, reusable and transparent centralized rules engine. Automating the benefits rules promises to reduce costs, errors and cycle times, resulting in more rapid, accurate, criteria-based decision making on veterans’ health benefits.
The Center currently relies on the Enrollment System Redesign (ESR) to manage eligibility and enrollment decisions involving veterans. Requirements for the eligibility and enrollment system are captured in business rules managed with the ILOG JRule rule engine product. Unfortunately, because ILOG implementation is tied to the ESR application, business rule changes demand additional software development and system patches.
“The BRR will put business rules back in the hands of Health Eligibility Center analysts, making it easier for them to augment or modify rules,” said Jim Traficant, president, Harris Healthcare Solutions. “The ILOG rules engine promises to make the rule base more transparent to business analysts, empowering them to not only make changes to rules, but also run simulations to gauge the impact of these changes without waiting a full software development cycle to create the patch.”
Harris will upgrade the ILOG implementation, decoupling the rules engine from the ESR system and making business rules changes independent from the application. Harris will train VA business analysts on how to create and modify rules to change the workstream of benefits applications and run potential rules changes in pilot scenarios for impact analysis.
A nationally recognized leader in healthcare IT integration, Harris offers a full range of interoperability solutions, including IT infrastructure and management, clinical workflow and analytics, health information exchange, and imaging. Harris solutions improve healthcare quality, safety, efficiency, cost and outcomes by ensuring that the right information travels, with security and privacy, to the right person, at the right time, on the right device, at the point of care.
About Harris Corporation
Harris is an international communications and information technology company serving government and commercial markets in more than 150 countries. Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has approximately $6 billion of annual revenue and about 17,000 employees — including nearly 7,000 engineers and scientists. Harris is dedicated to developing best-in-class assured communications® products, systems, and services. Additional information about Harris Corporation is available at www.harris.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that reflect management’s current expectations, assumptions and estimates of future performance and economic conditions. Such statements are made in reliance upon the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and future trends to differ materially from those matters expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Statements about the expected value of the program to Harris are forward-looking and involve risks and uncertainties. Harris disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.