healthcare app
Idana
Service helps to collect patient anamnesis before visiting a doctor. Developed web progressive app is compliant with IEC 62304 standard used in software for medical devices.
Introduction
Project summary
Idana is a medical software project from Tomes GmbH that improves the process of communication between patients and doctors in hospitals and general practices in Germany.
The medical platform helps to optimize time during visits to doctors by collecting all of the preliminary information about a patient’s health conditions and symptoms before the appointment.
Idana also stores the entire medical history for each patient so that doctors can easily access the required data. Idana’s main goal is innovation within the healthcare industry in Germany.
Initial request
Dear MLSDev development team,
We want to develop Idana - intelligent digital anamnesis. Idana professionally gathers medical history and enables automatic follow-ups from home. Idana is a cloud-based SaaS solution for healthcare providers (doctors, practices, clinics) and researchers.
Idana gathers a patient’s medical history by using digital questionnaires that can either be filled out on tablets provided by the institution in the waiting room, or by sending the patient an email with instructions so that they can fill it out at home.
Further information can be found on our website www.idana.com
We are looking for a development team that is capable of developing some features for our existing software. In order to help us decide if you are the right partner for us, please inform us about the following:
- Have you ever developed something similar to our project? (experience with medical software)
- What is your expertise with Node.js, Ruby, HTML5, JavaScript/TypeScript, Electron, React.js, Java/Kotlin, Obj-C/Swift?
- Do you speak German?
- What is your hourly wage? What are your prices?
- Do you support development according to IEC62304?
Please tell us a little about your company if you are interested in working for us. We will then send you a trial project and set up a non-disclosure contract. We are excited to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Theresa Eglin
Our amazing team
Idea
Idea of this medical software project
Automate the process of entering patient data like their health condition and symptoms
Provide a medical platform that is easy to understand and intuitive to use for patients from age 10 to 120 years
Optimize the work of the medical personnel in hospitals by reducing paperwork
Provide the transfer of digital data from patients to doctors within minutes
Automate and improve the quality of data collection in order to make doctors’ work more efficient and diagnoses more accurate
Client’s needs
Improve existing Android app by making it more intuitive and easy to use for its target audience, ages 10 to 120 years
Increase the product’s coverage by means of developing a patient app for all target platforms
Improve the existing Idana Web Editor for the product’s admins
Medical software development services provided by MLSDev
Created app design that covered the needs and requirements of the target audience, and implemented the improvements
Designed and developed a Progressive Web Application (PWA) that could be used on all major platforms (iOS, Android, web)
Refined the Idana Web Editor so that it could maximally support the functionality of the built PWA software
SERVICES
Services provided by our healthcare software company
Tech consulting
We offered the most suitable technical solution for the client’s case
Project management
A dedicated PM was responsible for meeting the project development deadlines
UI/UX design
We helped to make the product that delivers a flawless user experience
Web front-end development
The project’s goal was to cover a wider audience, so we started the PWA development
Web back-end development
All apps have their back-end systems. IDANA couldn’t be an exception
Android development
We helped our client to improve the existing MVP of the Android app
Quality assurance
Every app has to be stable and meet the initial requirements. QA & testing is a must-have
Technology stack used in the Idana medical platform
Android Development
- Android SDK
- Libsodium for encryption
- Firebase services: auth, database, storage
- sdp (scalable dp)
- Hawk for key storage
- RxJava2
- Retrofit2
- Glide
- Butterknife
Front-End Development
- HTML5
- CSS3
- Angular
- Stylus
- ngrx
- Service workers
- rxjs
- jasmine
- protractor
Tools
- JIRA
- GitHub
- Sentry
- lambdatest
- travis-ci
- npm
- Google Docs
- Invision
- Dropbox
HOW IT WORKS
How the entire healthcare management software behind Idana works
The team creates questionnaires
The Idana team and their medical consultants gather information about what data should be provided by patients before visiting a doctor, what the difference between questionnaires depending on a diagnosis is, and what common features these questionnaires have. This is preparatory paperwork of this healthcare management software.
The Idana team creates digital questionnaires via a special medical web portal - Idana Web Editor.
All questionnaires have a certain structure, hierarchy, specific parameters, and settings.
It is possible to create different sets of questionnaires for different hospitals and general practices, or to make some universal questionnaires accessible by all hospitals.
Doctors in general practices use the Idana desktop-client for PC & Mac
Via software for doctors, medical personnel can assign a specific questionnaire, or a set of questionnaires, to a particular patient. The app then sends a direct link to the questionnaire, or a QR code with the link, to the patient. This link contains basic information about the patient, including the recommended language. When the link is opened, the first screen asks for confirmation of the provided data.
In the app, a doctor can also see reports about completed questionnaires and review the anamnesis before an appointment.
A patient receives a link or QR code via their inbox. The expectation is then that the patient will fill in the questionnaire before their appointment via Idana Web app (formerly Idana Android app)
At the hospital, the patient receives a device with the installed app to fill in a questionnaire immediately.
It is also possible for the patient to complete a questionnaire on their own device from home.
Formerly, it was possible to download the Idana Android App from Google Play. The app was closed in summer 2018 and replaced by the improved and refined Idana Web App in September of that same year.
All the mentioned main apps interact with each other with the help of special tools and libraries
Idana Web App Lib — a library for saving data with patients’ answers
Idana Firestore — a module for storing the data
Other tools and libraries
APPLICATION
Android app
The client had an MVP Android app that they wanted to improve by implementing the following 3 things:
- Ability to change text size of the questionnaires at runtime
- Improve user experience and fix bugs
- Change the page-by-page navigation through questionnaires into vertical scroll
Android app project milestones
This positive result of our cooperation was possible because the client was very responsive and relied on the team. In its turn, our team found the best approach to this medical software project and figured out the best process of work that was maximally beneficial for our client. Overall, the healthcare mobile app development services on Android lasted 3 weeks.
Project discovery
Design
Android development
You always respond fast. Compared to the other agencies we used to communicate with, you are the fastest. You’ve inspired us to start working on our response time and we are trying to improve that on our side. You’ve provided a lot of details and that helped us see the points we didn’t think about before or didn’t notice.
PWA
Progressive web application
The client had a plan to gradually cover a wider audience, not only those patients and doctors in general practices that used Android devices.
As our customer was a developer himself, he didn’t consider cross-platform app development as a healthcare software solution. A possible and acceptable option was to create a progressive web application. The goal was to replace the Android app with a PWA software, but to keep all the good features of the former and add improvements to the latter.
Challenges during rendering our medical software development services
- Design for different screen sizes
- Compliance with the standards IEC/EN 62304
- Big scope of work and limited budget we had to work with
PWA software development milestones
- Research
- Mini early planning
- UX/UI design
- PWA front-end development
”We are happy about the results and how the process went both the design and development stages. We have nothing to complain about. We used to deal with 2 dev agencies. The first was too bad, while you were really good. It’s just like 2 opposite approaches. We’ve been happy with your team.”
Web editor development
As already mentioned, the client considered the opportunity to redevelop the existing Web Editor from scratch along with the progressive web application. Due to some budget matters, it was decided to continue only with PWA development.
In this regard, the team had to face the following challenges:
- • Legacy code that used deprecated technology
- • The main “question-answer” element had a free data structure that complicated its work
- • Security issues
- • No guarantee that some of the issues could be fixed in those conditions
“We are happy with the team as always. Andrey, Anastasia, and the rest of the team have been brilliant and responsive as always. Love working with them.”
Results
As of 2018, Idana had a running progressive web application that is used in doctor’s practices across Germany. Nevertheless, the client has ongoing plans and works on marketing strategy and promotion of a medical platform.
These days, the Idana team has begun to orient the healthcare software product on distinct features that have gained the biggest interest among potential customers rather than the product as a whole.
Our team created an Android app, PWA, and web editor for the Idana project. Our team is not building the product actively, but receives some tasks occasionally to improve the medical platform’s function. For example, our team has thus far worked on code refactoring, functionality support and extension, redevelopment of separate modules like navigation, and other minor changes.
At the moment, we continue to support the project.
MLSDev doesn’t just develop software in the healthcare industry; we care about every project and build trusting and friendly relationships with our customers. Idana is a great example of this kind of comfortable and trustworthy cooperation between our healthcare software company and the team in Germany.
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Full story
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