For the past several months, the majority of my time has gone into a web application for a startup called Accreditation Helper. The marketing site went live today, and next week the product will be shown publicly for the first time at the Medtrade show in Orlando.

This web app forms the heart of the business for Accreditation Helper, which assists home medical equipment companies in getting accredited. The application manages a master set of policies, forms, tasks, and resources, which are customized by each client.

From a business perspective, what I find interesting about this application is that it enables the delivery of what is essentially a services business. It allows a handful of centrally-located consultants to deal with hundreds of clients, thanks to the efficiency of having the web application manage all the documents and workflows.

There’s a lot of complexity in this application that isn’t immediately apparent, all in pursuit of user simplicity. For the technically inclined, to give you an idea of the size of the application, there’s 38 controllers and 42 models.

See our Portfolio page for more information.

I’ve been blogging for about a year over at www.mslater.com. That blog ended up being, well, eclectic, as it reflected diverse areas of interest to me. In the interest of making my blogging more reader-focused, I’m in the process of splitting my blogging up into a few different blogs.

This blog will focus on my major business activity: developing custom and semi-custom web sites for service businesses using the Ruby on Rails framework. I’ll have another blog, to be announced shortly, for nitty-gritty technical topics; this one will focus on how the web can deliver much more value for small and medium businesses.