Case Study: West Virginia Health Care Authority

Case Study: CompareCareWV Web Site

The Situation

The Governor of West Virginia put forth a mandate that all West Virginians should be able to compare health care costs across all health care providers in the state.

The Challenge

The West Virginia Health Care Authority pulled together a team of experts in database development and Web design, which included Image Associates, to produce the CompareCareWV Web site, where West Virginians could search through a massive database of medical procedures cross-referenced against the hospitals and other providers who performed them. The users could search by procedure or by distance from their location.

The Solution

CompareCareWV represented a massive collaboration between Image Associates, the IT Department of the West Virginia Health Care Authority and a third party database administration firm tasked with bringing vast amounts of information in to play. The site was built on a .Net framework and relies heavily on CSS for the look and feel. Image Associates served, in part, as a bridge between the highly technical minds of IT and the less technically inclined West Virginia Health Care Authority administrators to translate needs and wants between those two disparate worlds. The site’s front end, including the user interface, and the graphical look and feel were coded by Image Associates. The server code for pulling the information from the back end database into usable tables of data for users on the front end was also provided by Image Associates.

The Result

The CompareCareWV Web site has received positive notices and press and continues to provide empowerment to the people of West Virginia by way of increased knowledge of health care costs.