Helping patients manage and mitigate chronic diseases

Our clients were two founders, based in Adelaide, Australia, experienced in the healthcare industry, specifically in running a medical practice. They noticed a gap in the market of healthcare software solutions and have made an attempt to fill it with their new product.

The product is a web application dedicated to doctors, patients, and other health providers that allows users to set a plan in place for a patient as to how they’re going to manage and mitigate chronic diseases.

Business

The primary goal was to create an application that will let doctors treat patients from a more holistic perspective. Rather than just providing an ad-hoc treatment for any single ailment, the platform would enable doctors to access patients' full history of visits, medications and chronic diseases, incl. information sourced for other doctors and medical providers. Also, the platform's unique functionality would let doctors specify mid to long term treatment plans with the ability to monitor their execution.

The additional challenge was related to making sure that doctors will actually use (and keep returning to) the platform which made intuitive user interfaces and seamless integration with doctors’ workflow important goals of the project.

Technology

On the technology side, it was crucial to assure the reliability of the application as well as the privacy of patients’ sensitive medical data. The application also needed to allow for easy scalability in future.

Upon finalizing the scoping workshop, we set up a dedicated project team comprising a project manager, a product designer, two backend developers, and two frontend developers.

The team has followed our product design and development process to deliver the MVP within 6 months.

Among many completed features, one that stood out was an advanced recommendation algorithm that suggested the most appropriate healthcare services for a given patient at each step of the treatment. The factors considered by the algorithm included: health objectives set by doctors, the patient's current medical conditions and patient’s individual preferences. It also into account complex relations between healthcare services, where one can exclude or depend on the other.

The development of the recommendation algorithm enabled an automatic assignment of the most applicable healthcare plan based on a patient's pre-existing conditions as well as the most suitable healthcare professional for each service, from general practitioners to specialists.