Case study

Software product development for Think Research – Canadian healthtech company

Healthcare
Software Engineering

Location:

Canada, Toronto

Industry:

Healthcare

Partnership period:

November 2016 - August 2018

About our client

Think Research is a Canadian healthtech company developing knowledge-based solutions and tools to help clinicians deliver better care and enhance patient outcomes.

Business challenge

The client needed to modernize the technological stack of its software products as well as develop new solutions aimed to solve some of the health care’s most complex challenges.

N-iX approach

N-iX dedicated development team has boosted the client’s engineering capabilities and helped them to deliver value to the end-users faster. We have modernized the EntryPoint platform, developed an online referal management tool, built a virtual care platform, and completed many other tasks to help the client meet their business goals.

Value delivered

Development of eReferrals – a platform for referrals management that connects patients with the right specialists;
Development of Virtual Care – an online care platform that connects clinicians with patients and provides patients with all-time access to their clinical information;
Ensuring the security of the users’ personal information and the compliance of the solutions with healthcare regulations.

Client’s goals

The client’s key business idea is to connect clinicians, facilities and entire health care systems by providing them with software solutions and decision-making tools backed up by cutting-edge technologies.

Think Research teamed with N-iX to perform the following tasks:

Extend development capabilities by setting up a dedicated development team;
Support all of the existing solutions while seamlessly migrating them to newer technologies;
Build a platform for referrals management that connects patients with the right specialists;
Create a virtual B2C platform where patients and physicians would be able to easily make and track their appointments in real-time;
Ensure the security of the users’ personal information and the compliance of the products with healthcare regulations;

Challenges

Analyze the business logic, the existing code, and product functionality to smoothly migrate it to a newer version of Ruby on Rails framework;
Develop an efficient online care platform within a tight implementation timeline and regularly adjust the product in response to frequently changing requirements;
Integrate the platform with the partner’s healthcare system and perform constant QA to ensure its flawless operation;

Implementation

At the initial stages, N-iX team worked on support and continuous optimization of EntryPoint, a cloud-based platform developed by Think Research. This privacy-compliant solution supports a suite of healthcare applications providing easy access to patient profiles, documents, and other relevant materials. The company operates its own secure cloud servers ensuring the solutions meet the highest security standards regulated by Personal Health Information Protection Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). To enhance the existing code base, our specialists migrated all the client’s products to one of the latest versions of Ruby on Rails and Mongo Driver. Hence EntryPoint’s powerful search tools and user-specific workflow applications were efficiently modernized.

After the successful completion of the first iterations, the client decided to extend the cooperation with N-iX team on the development of new solutions. Two teams consisting of Product Owners, full-stack developers, and QA specialists were formed to work on the development of eReferrals and Virtual Care platform.

eReferrals (Care Portal) was developed to allow physicians to easily send referrals directly from electronic medical records (EMRs). It operates on a basis of a flexible workflow engine, adapted to many clinical settings and integrated with existing EMR assets. The portal features the following:

seamless referral status tracking;
a location-based specialist lookup;
full EMR integration;
appropriateness guidelines built into referrals;
auto-populating patient information option to avoid double entry;
automated notifications;

The second product N-iX team has worked on is Virtual Care – a powerful online care platform that connects clinicians with patients anywhere, anytime. The solution features a comprehensive library of clinical decision making tools and protocols. Virtual Care allows clinicians to choose between a variety of online consultation formats (video, audio, chat, secure messaging) depending on the patient needs. The platform offers the following possibilities:

Allows flexible scheduling for both on-call or calendar-based queuing models;
Contains an Embedded Progress Notes feature for taking real-time interdisciplinary notes;
Helps medical professionals gain real-time clinical and demographic insights across all phases of care with integrated Spotlight analytics tool;
Contains data on service trends, population health, public health, applications of best practices, resource utilization, and other quality indicators to help physicians improve the delivery of virtual care;
Provides patients with all-time access to their clinical information;

Value delivered by N-iX

Throughout the project, N-iX team has worked closely with the client’s in-house development team to identify the distinct business and functional requirements and translate them into efficient solutions. To maintain effective communication and deliver results faster, the team used Agile methodologies: Kanban and Scrum. This allowed us to collect constant feedback and deliver the functionality which satisfies the client’s’ business needs. Thus N-iX experts delivered the following results:

supported and modernized the technological stack of the EntryPoint platform applying the latest coding practices;
developed an online referral management tool which incorporates the best practices to improve communication, workflow, and appropriateness of referrals;
built a virtual care platform enabling new care pathways by connecting patients with high quality clinical support.

The team contributed to enhancing the client’s software products and developed new point-of-care solutions from scratch. We paid special attention to strengthening the reliability of cloud-based solutions ensuring they meet the highest security and privacy standards.

Expertise delivered:

Dedicated Development Team, Software Product Development, Mobile App Development, Software QA & Testing, Cloud Solutions

Technologies:

Java, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails 4.2/5.0, MongoDB, Redis, MySQL, React/Redux, React Native, TestUnit, Sidekiq, PostgreSQL, RSpec, Angular JS, RabbitMQ,Git, Jenkins, BitBucket

Flexible

appointment scheduling

All-time access

to clinical information

Efficient

remote supervision

Seamless

referral status tracking

Compliance

with rigid healthcare regulations