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Prototype Findings

A summary of findings, lessons learned and additional questions from our work on the initial technical prototype.

Summary

The purpose of the initial technical prototype was to develop and test different approaches to accessing data in Alaska DPA’s existing legacy systems (the Master Client Index [MCI], ARIES and EIS) from a cloud environment. A secondary benefit of this prototyping work was that it provided an opportunity to validate some technology choices, and to build out and refine our DevSecOps strategy.

A fuller description of our rationale to prototyping can be found in our project GitHub repo, and a high-level overview of our technical design can be found here.

This document and the associated prototype code are not meant to be prescriptive in nature - we expect vendors to use their best judgement, experience and technical expertise to design and deliver great software. Vendors should use this report and associated materials (contained within public Github repos) as a supplement to the RFP.

Description

Components

The prototype lives in the ProtoWebApi solution. This is an ASP.NET Web API application targeting the .NET Core 2.0 platform and is deployed in the Azure App Service. The proxy API for interacting with legacy on-premise data sources is in the AKRestAPI directory, and the UI components are in the wwwroot directory. Tests are in AKRestAPI.Tests (just some sample controller tests for now).

MCI: The Master Client Index (MCI) is an on-premise SOAP-based web service that supports searching for DPA clients by name and other other search criteria. The MCI contains high-level client information about individuals participating in state of Alaska programs. (e.g. Client IDs, demographic information, etc.)

ARIES: Alaska’s Resource for Integrated Eligibility Services (ARIES) is a solution implemented by a previous vendor to support eligibility determination for MAGI Medicaid. This is a Java-based solution with a Postgres backend running in a managed hosting environment in the State of Alaska.

Staging Table: Staging tables reside within the ARIES environment and are used to temporarily store transmitted application information received from the ARIES Self Service Portal (SSP) and the Federally Facilitated Marketplace (FFM). Note - we did not access staging tables data as part of the prototype, but the same method for accessing ARIES data should also work for these tables if necessary.

EIS: The Eligibility Information System (EIS) is a legacy system that was implemented prior to the development of ARIES and contains applicant information for public assistance programs and services. This is a Natural/ADABAS system running on the state mainframe. Because of some limitations with the ARIES system, eligibility technicians occasionally “fall back” to EIS to process applications. As such, MAGI Medicaid applications are contained in both ARIES and EIS systems.

Key Findings

We used Azure Hybrid Connection to facilitate access to on-premise legacy systems from the Azure App Service. Both links in the previous sentence point to our DevSecOpsMVP repository in Github. There you will find much more information about The AppService PaaS and the associated HybridConnection: gotchas, limitations, code, and other documentation. In general the AppService and HybridConnection are simple to create, configure, and operate. Limitations we’ve found so far (i.e. SQL Server only supports SQL Server Authentication over the Hybrid Connection) have not turned into blockers.

Access to the EIS system can be achieved in several different ways, and we spent time exploring the use of SQL Server’s Linked Server functionality with an ODBC connector for ADABAS from Software AG. The most efficient method of accessing this data seems to be a simple RESTful service layer that runs on top of EntireX Broker and small, custom Natural programs to access ADABAS. This latter approach was succesfully tested as part of our prototype work.

Our prototype work ended up involving a number of representatives from the department and state security offices, and both groups have become more familiar with the approach to legacy data access we’ve developed during our work. However, interacting with these groups and ensuring that all required security checks and documentation are completed will be essential to successful product delivery.

Relevant Repositories / Resources

Other Questions / Considerations

One of the risks we identified early in this project was around network latency in DPA field offices in different locations around the State of Alaska. This risk was not thoroughly explored during the prototype phase because of limited time. High latency might require a different technical design than the one used for our prototype, which isolates access to various backend systems in separate calls to a proxy service.

Legacy data schemas are complex and may be inconsistent across different systems. We obtained a better understanding of the legacy data sources through our prototyping process. However, completely mapping these schemas and reconciling them was beyond the scope of this work. Identifying which data elements to return in a search solution and linking data in different systems will be an important aspect of the search application and will be closely tied to user research activities.

A requirement of the project is that new modules and features be integrated into the state’s existing authentication and authorization framework. This was identified early in the prototyping process as an area of potential risk. And while our prototype does not leverage this existing framework, we did some early research to get a better understanding of the steps required to do so.

Integrating new modules into the existing ARIES production environment was identified as an area of risk, but the work and LOE required to do this were not completed as part of our prototyping efforts.

Appendix: Component APIs

Introduction

The three components that the prototype knit together — the MCI, ARIES, and EIS — required varying levels of work to make it possible to issue a query to them via a RESTful API. What follows is a brief description of how we made a query to each system, with a sample of what that query response looks like.

The MCI has a native API, so its responsive is illustrative of what future work with it will look like, but we built API layers for ARIES and EIS, so the sample responses from those indicate only the choices that we made, and not what any future work will actually interface with.

MCI

The Master Client Index, uniquely among the three data sources, has a an API. It is SOAP-based, and exposes a method for searching by various client criteria. True to its name, the MCI functions as a single source of truth of what data is housed within ARIES and EIS, and includes unique ARIES and EIS identifiers (as applicable) for all included records. Here is an excerpt of the useful portion of the result of a query to MCI, on our user-acceptance testing environment, for a person of the name John Public:

<VirtualId>6960492</VirtualId>
<MatchPercentage></MatchPercentage>
<Title></Title>
<FirstName>John</FirstName>
<MiddleName></MiddleName>
<LastName>Public</LastName>
<Suffix></Suffix>
<DateOfBirth>1980-10-21T00:00:00.000</DateOfBirth>
<Gender>Male</Gender>
<Registrations>
  <Registration>
    <RegistrationName>ARIES_ID</RegistrationName>
    <RegistrationValue>2000027440</RegistrationValue>
  </Registration>
</Registrations>
<Names>
  <Name>
    <NameType>Registered</NameType>
    <Title></Title>
    <FirstName>John</FirstName>
    <MiddleName></MiddleName>
    <LastName>Public</LastName>
    <Suffix></Suffix>
  </Name>
</Names>
<Addresses />
<VirtualId>6974287</VirtualId>
<MatchPercentage></MatchPercentage>
<Title></Title>
<FirstName>JACK</FirstName>
<MiddleName></MiddleName>
<LastName>PUBLIC</LastName>
<Suffix></Suffix>
<DateOfBirth>1970-05-21T00:00:00.000</DateOfBirth>
<Gender>Male</Gender>
<Registrations>
  <Registration>
    <RegistrationName>EIS_ID</RegistrationName>
    <RegistrationValue>0600223715</RegistrationValue>
  </Registration>
  <Registration>
    <RegistrationName>MediCaid</RegistrationName>
    <RegistrationValue>0600223715</RegistrationValue>
  </Registration>
  <Registration>
    <RegistrationName>SSN</RegistrationName>
    <RegistrationValue>551516584</RegistrationValue>
  </Registration>
</Registrations>
<Names>
  <Name>
    <NameType>Registered</NameType>
    <Title></Title>
    <FirstName>JACK</FirstName>
    <MiddleName></MiddleName>
    <LastName>PUBLIC</LastName>
    <Suffix></Suffix>
  </Name>
</Names>
<Addresses>
  <Address Type="Matching" Value="123 SOME ST UNIT 111 JOE'S HOUSE">
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>HouseNameNumber</Type>
      <Value>123 SOME ST</Value>
    </LocationElement>
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>HouseNameNumber</Type>
      <Value>UNIT 111 JOE'S HOUSE</Value>
    </LocationElement>
  </Address>
  <Address Type="Mailing Address" Value="123 SOME ST ANCHORAGE AK">
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>Address Line</Type>
      <Value>123 SOME ST</Value>
    </LocationElement>
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>City</Type>
      <Value>ANCHORAGE</Value>
    </LocationElement>
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>State</Type>
      <Value>AK</Value>
    </LocationElement>
  </Address>
  <Address Type="Physical Address" Value="UNIT 111 JOE'S HOUSE ANCHORAGE AK 99501">
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>Address Line</Type>
      <Value>UNIT 114</Value>
    </LocationElement>
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>Address Line</Type>
      <Value>JOE'S HOUSE</Value>
    </LocationElement>
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>City</Type>
      <Value>ANCHORAGE</Value>
    </LocationElement>
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>State</Type>
      <Value>AK</Value>
    </LocationElement>
    <LocationElement>
      <Type>ZIP</Type>
      <Value>99501</Value>
    </LocationElement>
  </Address>
</Addresses>

Our prototype includes functionality to issue a query to this SOAP interface.

For more detailed information about the MCI API, see Attachment E for the WSDL interface definition, which is the authoritative definition of the MCI’s “person” service.

ARIES

ARIES has no API, but can be interfaced with via its PostgreSQL database. The database is comprised of hundreds of tables, and contains all data present within ARIES. For our prototype, we used a single query to ARIES’ database to retrieve the status of a given application, using the ARIES ID found within the MCI.

Our prototype delivers the minimum viable response—the ARIES ID, application ID, and application status—which looks like this:

[  
   {  
      "indv_id":2400000003,
      "app_num":"T14000001",
      "application_status_cd":"DI"
   }
]

Again, that response is an MVP, created solely for a prototype. For the work of this search unification project, it will be necessary to interface with PostgreSQL, and doing so may result in returning more or different data in the response than we chose to for this prototype.

EIS

EIS runs in an MVS mainframe environment, built using COBOL, Natural and Adabas. Modern systems can access data stored in EIS via two mechanisms: SQL Gateway and EntireX Broker. We initially planned to have the prototype use SQL Gateway, because that would involve no work within EIS’s infrastructure. But because Adabas is non-relational, only very crude queries were plausible, and that would have required extracting far too many records, in turn requiring further processing to return only the correct ones.

The use of EntireX Broker means that new data being made available from EIS must have some corresponding Natural written to run on the mainframe. Our technical staff writes and maintains these, so prepared a simple Natural “stub” to extract data to be delivered via EntireX Broker. Because EntireX Broker isn’t web-facing, creating new API methods requires that we update a thin web-service layer that relays this data from EntireX to an HTTP interface. We intend to continue to perform this work as needed, and do not expect vendors to write Natural or otherwise perform any work on the EIS mainframe.

The data—returned from our API, relayed from EntireX Broker, relayed from EIS—looks like this:

<cHES18F01 xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/AE_WebService.AE_WebService" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <inClientFName>JANE</inClientFName>
  <inclientDob>20011201</inclientDob>
  <inclientLName>DOE</inclientLName>
  <inclientMName/>
  <inclientSex>F</inclientSex>
  <inclientSsn>123456789</inclientSsn>
  <optDESCRIPTION/>
  <optOPTION>00</optOPTION>
</cHES18F01>

Our prototype includes functionality to issue queries to that EIS API.