How we built software for the medical industry

This article is part of a series about healthcare software automation. See below a list of all the articles in this series, they’ll be linked as we post them. If you don’t see links below, they’re most likely coming soon:

1. Are you losing time & money to manual healthcare workflows?
2. What you can automate in your healthcare app workflows
3. How we built software for the medical industry
4. Should you automate your healthcare workflows?
5. Types of apps you can build for the medical industry

We’ve worked on a wide variety of software throughout our careers. Payment getaways, online shops, complex analytics systems. But the ones that took the biggest mental load - yet gave the most satisfying results - were the healthcare platforms we’ve worked on.

In this series of articles, we’ve talked about what automation is and why it’s important for the healthcare industry. But for it all to truly click together, we need to talk about some real cases where we took a series of manual medical workflows and turned them into software that makes a clinic’s day to day life much more efficient.

So in this article, we’re going to do quick case studies of the biggest and most challenging healthcare software we’ve built. We hope to show you how our product discovery process works in such specific cases, how we gather information and how we come up with solutions on how to automate inefficient medical workflows.

Here are the projects we’re going to talk about:

1. MediTrack, a medical supply tracker (focuses on inventory)

2. Augen, an ophthalmological clinic management platform

3. SeeBeyond, a holistic app for tracking one’s health and wellness journey

Medical supply tracking software, MediTrack

PG services, a company from Switzerland, came to us with a very interesting project. They had been working on a series of sensors that can detect if the weight and volume of a drawer’s contents change throughout the day. They decided to work with hospitals and use these devices to track the comings and goings of their medical supplies.

The challenge? Hospital owners couldn't just install the devices in their pharmacies and they’d magically show them data somewhere. They needed a system where they could graphically set up what their pharmacies look like, where the devices would go, and very detailed aspects of each element - racks, drawers, sections, frames, cameras, you name it.

It wasn’t the easiest project we’ve been presented with. The inventory aspect of it reminded us of online stores, but it wasn’t that simple: hospital staff didn’t just need to see how many syringes they had in certain spots, but how many were taken out and added back to specific drawers. They needed to know if their supplies were getting replaced regularly, not simply for medical staff to use, but also to ensure nothing gets lost or taken away maliciously.

We were faced with quite a challenge: such a system already sounded complex before we even started. The biggest thing was figuring out what the app users actually needed.

Here are a few steps we take during the product discovery process of a healthcare app:

1. Figuring out who the users are. Is the app for doctors, nurses, orderlies or is it for staff members who don’t handle patient care (such as receptionists or warehouse technicians)? In a field like medicine, this distinction is key: doctors are busier and burnt out, nurses have less medical expertise but know a lot, however they’re also tired and overworked, while non-medical staff can only handle certain tasks so they don’t put patients’ lives at risk.
2. Figuring out what those users need. In order to build an app for hospital technicians, you gotta find out what they actually do, what’s not working in their day to day work lives, and what their needs are, in the context of the app you’re building. This helps you find what kind of user flows the app needs to have.
3. Listing the main things the app should do. Once you know who the users are and what they need, you gotta figure out what exactly they’ll do within the app. Let’s say it’s a patient-facing clinic’s app: they should be able to see & manage their appointments and medical history, so they need a list of their appointments, notifications when their appointments are coming up, a chatbot that helps them get information or reschedule appointments, and a space to see all the data the medical staff has written down about them, like their diagnosis and prescribed treatments.

Following that structure, we came to the conclusion that MediTrack needed a space to manage hospitals, their buildings, floors, pharmacies, racks, drawers, equipment and staff. All of these marked the app’s foundation and would guide the app’s main processes.

The big challenge was figuring out how to connect their real-life devices with the app. Technically it wasn’t too complex, as our developers could get data from the sensors into the app. The issue was finding a good way to display that data.

So we built a highly detailed configuration wizard that guides hospital staff into accurately describing what their real-life pharmacies look like and where the sensors are going, including all essential data like measurements, positions and specific equipment connected to each rack, drawer and container.

After that, staff would be able to view stock status per each pharmacy, with data provided by the real-life sensors placed in those rooms.

This took us to the last essential part of the app: not just seeing stock data, but taking action on it. We created user flows that would allow staff to send notifications to warehouse technicians that they needed to refill certain products in specific rooms. Technicians get notifications on their phones and medical staff can then get notified when they’ve restocked the supplies, so they don’t need to check stock information or go check the pharmacies themselves.

Ophthalmological clinic management platform, Augen

Augen came to us with quite the challenge. Their clinic provides certain procedures that need to take place on a pre-settled schedule. Patients need to come in at a very specific interval of weeks to get the procedure done, then they need to come in for a check-up a few days after each procedure.

This already sounded complex to begin with; even analog, it takes quite some effort to organize such treatment plans. But it’s not impossible, and they certainly made it work until they came to us. Their existing healthcare systems worked for sure, but they didn’t fulfill all their clinic needs.

The real issue was that many patients missed their appointments, and staff somehow needed to reschedule the entire treatment plan. Only one missed appointment led to 8 other appointments needing to be re-organized, and somehow finding spots for each of them amidst an already busy schedule.

What they needed from a custom healthcare software was a way to automate rescheduling these series of appointments. Instead of taking the time looking through a calendar and counting weeks, a piece of software that does it for them was going to make a major difference.

So we built a system where doctors or staff would set a standard for the patient’s series of procedures, and the appointment dates would get calculated automatically right below. Staff can pick from available time frames, and if any appointment needs to be changed, everything that follows is re-calculated automatically.

Through their new calendar of appointments, the staff can quickly see what’s coming up, what slots are free to schedule patients in, and which appointments were missed. They can also mark appointments as missed right from this page.

After building the most essential parts of the app, the calendar and the appointment manager, we slowly built up all the other admin sections the clinic needed to manage: patients, staff, medication & lens orders, staff, procedures, insurance, users and so on.

We discussed all features with the app stakeholders over time: this allowed us to constantly iterate so we’d build a healthcare software solution that actually helped them.

By having a collaborative system, we managed to implement all the complex dependencies they deal with day to day. Certain diagnoses meant a certain treatment plan. Some insurance policies only covered some medications. Some staff members work overtime while some work shorter schedules. We went over all these details and added them into the app’s under-the-hood logic.

This way, the clinic’s knowledge base doesn’t all have to be in a few staff members’ minds, but it’s stored in a secure, personalized medical app.

A holistic app for tracking one’s health and wellness journey, SeeBeyond

SeeBeyond came to us needing an all-encompassing healthcare software solution. Compared to the other apps we talked about in this article, SeeBeyond wanted an entirely patient-facing health app. Aimed at people who wanted to get healthier, they wanted to give users the ability to track every aspect of their health & wellness, as well as schedule appointments to see their specialists.

The challenge with this app wasn’t to figure out complex flows, but to truly focus on user needs. What parts of their health and wellness would they want to track? How can a mobile app give them a holistic approach to managing their health?

We took the time to figure out, and decide upon a series of key aspects users should be able to manage in such a medical app:

• User goals. If they’re tracking their health and wellness, they should start with a series of goals, such as eating better, improving quality of life or getting stronger.
• Health trackers. To see if they’re achieving their goals, users should track whichever aspects of their health they’re trying to improve. This includes nutrition, physical activity, sleep, mental health, weight or supplements.
• Actionable items. The client provides in-person appointments for people who want to improve their health. We integrated that into the app, so that users can make appointments, attach lab results to their account for doctors to see, or talk to medical professionals. We also added sections where users can view recipes and save ingredients, view nearby pharmacies, manage documents and review health providers.
• Social interactions. We also added a community-like aspect to the app. Users can add friends and take part in community challenges, such as 7 days with no sugar. This helps users stay engaged and get closer to their friends (added bonus).

In patient-facing medical software development, obviously you have to think about the patients first. How can your app help them manage medical data and lifestyle preferences and goals without it getting too overwhelming?

In the case of this app, we decided the best approach was to integrate all aspects of a person’s health in a holistic way. From their head down to their toes: mental health, sleep, nutrition, supplements, physical activity, you name it.

By starting with a specific goal, let’s say, for instance, reaching a better physical stamina, we’d take users through all necessary steps all within the app: they could get an appointment with a health professional to evaluate their current condition and get recommendations, then they could get blood tests and add them into their account, discuss them with their doctors, and then track essential data such as their meals, physical activity, sleep, water intake, supplements, and so on.

By keeping all of these in one place, the users don’t have to manually write down their meals, calculate calories, use other apps to track workouts, make phone calls to get appointments and have to remember what the doctors told them, or have trouble communicating with their health professionals.

There are lots of different healthcare software out there. Some of it heavily specialized (such as Augen in our story here), some patient-centric, and some heavily technical but also essential in the medical field. What ties them all together is the way technology managed to simplify manual workflows and make patient care a lot more efficient.

If you’re looking to improve your healthcare workflows through software and become one of our success stories, let’s chat and see what we can build together.

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