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Enhancing the quality and maintainability of critical Medicaid Data Collection Tools

Content design, Software development

We’re improving the quality and maintainability of a suite of inherited applications that state agencies depend on for annual Medicaid reporting. By reducing technical debt, optimizing development workflows, and establishing documentation standards, we’re focused on creating a more reliable and sustainable infrastructure.

Client

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

The challenge

The Medicaid Data Collection Tools (MDCT) are a suite of applications used by state agencies to submit annual Medicaid reporting data across federal programs. The applications we inherited had significant quality and process gaps, like:

  • Test coverage that confirmed code loaded without catching real bugs
  • No documentation for form development processes
  • Manual, error-prone production deployment processes
  • Slow build times caused by redundant pipeline tasks
  • No single source of truth for application content, causing rework and lost institutional knowledge

Our approach

Testing and code quality

  • Replaced unreliable tests with meaningful unit tests that validate real functionality and user interactions
  • Cleaned up console errors from improperly configured tests, making automated test suites more accurate and reliable
  • Enforced testing thresholds requiring all pull requests to pass, closing gaps that allowed undertested code to be merged

Deployment and pipeline automation

  • Designed and implemented a custom GitHub Action to automate production deployment pull requests with standardized formatting
  • Audited CI/CD pipelines across all applications, removing duplicate jobs and introducing conditional logic to reduce build times

Code standardization, reusability, and documentation

  • Identified and eliminated code duplication across three inherited applications, establishing reusable patterns and shared components
  • Created detailed technical documentation across all six MDCT applications, giving teams a single source of truth
  • Streamlined how content updates are proposed, reviewed, approved, and implemented across teams

Keys to success

Blue Tiger is a key partner in ensuring the success of this ongoing effort led by Coforma.

  • Systematic, standards-based approach to quality improvement across a multi-application ecosystem
  • Close coordination with designers and subject matter experts throughout development
  • Prioritization of automation to eliminate manual errors and reduce developer toil
  • Documentation and knowledge transfer that protected institutional knowledge as teams and team members changed over time

“Delivered the new work with impressive efficiency, successfully implementing several complex new components and functionalities. Thank you for the meticulous care you put into ensuring a seamless experience for our users.”
— Contracting Partner

Results and impact

We are improving the quality, reliability, and maintainability of critical Medicaid data collection tools while establishing documentation standards that support teams in the long-run.

  • Increased CARTS test coverage from 79% to 83% in a single pull request, with improvements concentrated in high-value, high-risk code
  • Reduced CI/CD pipeline runtime for one critical job from approximately four minutes to under one minute, with average workflow time dropping by nearly six minutes across an entire application
  • Automated production deployment pull request generation, ensuring consistent formatting and accuracy for every release
  • Successfully developed and launched the NAAAR report in MCR, meeting critical deployment deadlines while introducing new technical patterns
  • Created a lasting documentation foundation across all applications, protecting institutional knowledge as teams and team members change