According to research from an analytical agency Frost & Sullivan, the market for digital medical solutions will reach $6 billion by 2021 with an annual growth of 40%. It means that e-Health records and health apps will be used more actively all over the world. So now, an increasing number of medical organizations want to create integrated portals that assist in the doctors’ work and improve the quality of patient care.
However, some medical companies have long gone side by side with modern applications. One of the worthwhile developments is the Intetics Remote In-Sourcing Team® project, which served a medical company uniting clinics of various specializations. Thanks to convenient tools for scheduling appointments, checking health insurance, and tracking the business income stages, the project increased the company’s profit and helped to serve 5 million patients per year.
Project Features
Intetics Client was a medical company led by a doctor who realized that existing applications or tools for managing medical practice did not meet the needs of both patients and doctors themselves. As a result, the company decided to implement a universal portal that would optimize patient care and medical business development.
The most challenging task was finding a developer who would understand all the healthcare sector specifics because the Client is an expert in the medical field, not an IT professional. The company needed a team that would develop a full engineering cycle from sketch to finished application.
Intetics’ Remote In-Sourcing Team® took on the Client’s idea, starting to develop the specific tools that can work both integrated and separately:
- Collection and retention technologies for clinic patients;
- Automation of routine personnel tasks;
- Creation of patient admission schedules;
- Requesting data from other medical organizations;
- Creation of recommendations for care based on insurance rules;
- Development of a symptom checker and much more.
The Client’s basic request for the healthcare awareness of engineers was met, so the company has been working with the client for 10 years, creating and implementing 100% of their products. Moreover, the collaboration continues to expand — the team of engineers maintaining the portal and other tools has grown from 5 to 50+ specialists.
The Main Objectives
E-health systems consist of elements responsible for data storing, gaining access to e-records by doctors, and developing a unified base of terms, guidelines, and common standards. Thus, the project’s goal was to create an informative, user-friendly, and completely secure portal. In addition, the Client needed various tools to track certain indicators:
- Business profitability;
- The quality of patient care and their satisfaction with the company’s medical services;
- Company productivity and ways to improve it through the automation of workflow tasks;
- The overall efficiency of the company and separately for specialized clinics.
Thanks to this combination of tools, three tasks are solved at once:
- For a business owner — fulfilling the control over the activities and efficiency of the business.
- For doctors — keeping medical records as accurately as possible, saving data on prescriptions and medications, and systematizing and analyzing the available information about the patient.
- For patients — receiving the highest quality medical care and having access to their appointments and e-records.
The project development and the objectives’ achievement required many diverse specialists: team leads, project managers, technical developers, system analysts, QA engineers, and, of course, designers.
Project Creation: Technologies and Solutions
The implementation of the Client’s idea required the use of various technologies:
- AWS. Amazon Web Services is a massive cloud infrastructure with a host of security certifications – PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, FISMA Moderate, FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 1, and SOC 2 verification reports.
- .NET Core. This development platform allows engineers to create applications suitable for various platforms: Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and macOS in three programming languages (C#, F#, and Visual Basic).
- SignalR. It is a library for ASP.NET developers that makes it easy to add real-time components to applications. SignalR also “opens the door” to a new type of web app that requires fast communication with the server. For instance, when doctors request patient information from other healthcare facilities.
- WebRTC. It is a tool that provides streaming audio data, video data, and content between applications in real-time (important for timely communication of patients with doctors in case of the impossibility of an in-person visit to the clinic). The tool is actively used by such large-scale projects as Google Meet, Jitsi Meet, and BigBlueButton.
- Entity Framework. It is a database solution for programming in the .NET family of languages.
- OpenCV. It is a library of computer vision, image processing, and general-purpose numerical algorithms.
- xUnit. It is a free, open-source unit test tool for .NET with broad community support.
Also, the project’s development required the use of Microservices, React, Swift, Kotlin, HTML5, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, WordPress, Kazoo, Google Speech to Text, Web sockets, Vaintiv, ZeroBounce, MS SQL Server, and PostgreSQL technologies.
The client’s request was satisfied in several stages:
- Creation of a program layout from Intetics, which would provide equal access to information for specialists and patients;
- Introduction of the ability to register, change profile settings, add medical information, and upload the necessary documents;
- Launching the symptom checker;
- Adding the function of interaction with other medical institutions to request info about a patient (for example, treatment regimen or reaction to a particular drug);
- Introduction of business instruments.
The last stage was the implementation of business optimization tools and testing the application before the final launch.
Remote In-Sourcing® Team’s Work Result
“The Intetics Remote In-Sourcing Team® helped us start a digital business in parallel with the medical field. We are growing together, and we have big plans. I appreciate the work that the Intetics team is doing for us.”
The result of the company’s work completely satisfied the Client
The Client also noted the general results of the work:
- The development team created a digital business from scratch, bringing the project idea to life, and now constantly supports the use of the portal.
- Unlike previous failed attempts to create an integrated system, the new project was crowned with success, as the Client trusted the help of professional vendors.
- According to the latest data, the annual turnover of patients is 5 million and is constantly increasing.
The entire path of creating a medical portal from the start of work to the launch took 10 months. However, the cooperation did not stop there — the system is constantly updated and supplemented with new useful functions.
In general, the digitalization of medical services is the right way of innovation. Such portals will significantly simplify the circulation of medical documents and increase the efficiency of doctors’ work. Also, special apps will help to make the medical business more successful. The main thing is just to find an experienced vendor to implement the project and support its further usage.
