Web app vs .net4 app in healthcare IT

Thoughts on 10 years of IT support/development for health care applications. If you follow this blog you’ll know I’m not the best writer. These are kind of free form thoughts on the subject.

• App Deployment
  • My first job in Healthcare IT support and dev was a discipline specific EHR application. It was/is a .net application that had 2 parts, a server app that connected to a database, and the client software that ran on each users machine. Performing installs required me to set up the client on each machine. I came up with a few ways to do it quickly, but any time the users called we had to trouble shoot both the client machine and the application server. Larger institutions would set up the client on their Citrix application server, but most locations did not have this option. Keeping track of app versions was such a pain at smaller client locations.
  • My current project is a web application that runs internally at a hospital. It’s great. 1 system to deploy on, 1 system to trouble shoot. Short cuts to the app are saved bookmarks. The citrix admins love it, since they only have to support the browser and not a whole new application. IT loves it since they only have to track 1 server.
  • MS Sql Server is great. That’s the only part I script for on the project. I have no idea why I mention this, I’m just fond of MS SQL Server. Setting up a new instance is easy, even when deploying the Linux version (ok the Linux version was just for me to poke at, not deployment).
    • Larger institutions usually have a MS SQL instance set up, so we don’t need to do this our selves.
• Personal Sanity
  • Issues are easier to trouble shoot. Instead of installing software on 30+ machines, we only have to trouble shoot 1 VM when issues come up. IIS is pretty stable, and Windows Server has pretty high up time.
  • .net 4 apps have these weird load up times where it complies itself on execution causing slow down.
    • yes it’s been a while since I worked on this project, so this could have changed with the latest version.
  • There is some support issues when users decide to try Internet Explorer with the app, but that was easy to fix: our app does not allow a user to log in when using IE.
  • Every browser maker seems to be moving to Blink/Chromium. So dev work focuses on that. Personally I’m not a fan of everyone allowing Google to set web standards, but IT departments are on board with Edge switching to Chromiuim, so “buy in” is pretty easy.
  • Application automatically works on iPads and Android! We don’t have to develop a separate app for these platforms. Users like being able to pick what kind of device they access the application from. I used to hear constant gripes about the old app “I want to use my mac” or “this would be a great iPad app”.
• Fun Learning Curve
  • The best part is when you show that, yes, the web server needs to have 4+ GB of Ram to handle all the users and you get to have the “memory requirements are not suggestions” conversation.

Internal web apps are much easier to support and deploy. I see Hospital applications have moved/are moving in this direction. There’s a good chance these internal web apps will move to the “cloud” around the same time. Hospitals really like the flexibility this gives them.