Haccah

Overview

Haccah provides testing, analysis, and organization applications for professional psychology, therapy, and psychiatry practices. Their testing, typically behavioral testing, is administered to end patients by teachers, agencies, or psychologists.

Haccah’s application gathers these tests and assesses the applicants against specific diagnoses, analyzing them in large data sets and ultimately producing an output with detailed feedback.

Haccah uses a central FileMaker system to store test results and assess patients against specific diagnoses. The system leverages large data sets to produce test outputs with detailed feedback.

This application supports several hundred tests that cover a broad range of behavioral testing, including psychological, academic, medical, and more.

The Challenge

Haccah’s clients needed additional utility from the platform: More tests, forms, and responses. Unfortunately, the system was not designed for such an expansive suite of options and ran slowly.

The application itself took several minutes to open. It would often freeze during use and be prone to crashing. Clients expressed concern about the application’s performance: the content was valuable, but the system needed a revamp.

Haccah considered replacing the entire system at a significant cost and major disruption to their business. The system incorporated thousands of hours of accumulated knowledge and expertise and had significant business value if saved.

The Task

Before creating a new system from scratch, Haccah tasked Kyo Logic with reviewing and, if possible, overhauling the existing platform to improve performance and preserve their valuable data.

Our Process

Kyo Logic’s initial analysis showed that the existing system structure incorporated too many internal dependencies for Haccah’s older FileMaker system to handle at scale. Every change in the system caused a cascade of internal recalculations amounting to tens of thousands of real-time updates. These recalculations created major performance bottlenecks.

Luckily, fixing the internal dependencies would cost a fraction of replacing the entire system and could be completed in a few hundred hours of work. After demonstrating how dependency fixes could reduce load time from minutes to seconds, the Kyo Logic team worked on 4 – 5 high-impact change areas.

The focus was first to tackle the most used sections of the application. This process showed immediate results and improved the application to a point where results were apparent internally and with end clients.