Largest nonprofit provider of senior care services in America
Rearchitected and redesigned remote patient monitoring service dashboard improved business and health outcomes
Redesigned Internet of Things (IoT) dashboard to help healthcare organization save time and money while improving patient outcomes
Challenge
A clunky user experience restricted the nonprofit’s ability to implement its remote patient monitoring service, and legacy architecture kept the application from achieving its full potential.
Outcome
Surge – a Catalyte company’s redesign and rearchitecture made the application more productive and efficient, resulting in reduced time for the organization’s staff members to access and act on patient data, improved quality of patient care and increased flexibility and lower costs for the client to scale the application.
The largest nonprofit provider of senior care and services in America, serving over 27,000 people around the country, operates a forward-thinking home wellness initiative.
This IoT project places multiple sensors in patients’ homes and transmits data to senior care specialists who can remotely monitor for abnormalities in daily routines that might signify potential health issues. This initiative allows seniors to age in place, while simultaneously reducing overall healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes.
Scalability and improved user design needed to meet business needs
As the IoT project grew, the healthcare organization sought ways to:
- Improve and streamline the UI/UX of Insights Dashboard, the application used to monitor sensor data and report on patients’ health.
- Better manage the backlog of development requests generated by the business.
- Reimagine the application’s architecture to make it more scalable.
- Train its internal development staff to maintain the product using agile development methodologies.
The healthcare organization partnered with Surge on this project because of its ability to:
- Implement user-centric design principles to improve the usability and efficiency of the application.
- Rearchitect the platform to make it easier and cheaper to scale.
- Coach client’s development staff in agile methodologies while simultaneously redeveloping the application.
Surge delivers rearchitected and redesigned application in just 12 weeks
The work was conducted on a compressed schedule, only 12 weeks in total. Surge engineers ramped to full speed in just two sprints, which included mastering the new technology of Angular2.
Surge’s UI/UX experts immediately engaged client stakeholders and application users (nurses, doctors, caregivers, etc.) to create a reality map and observe real-world tasks they complete with the app. Using user-centric design principles, Surge iteratively produced sketches, wireframes and InVision prototypes to test ideas with users. These integrated into the team’s agile process to ensure that design efforts were aligned to the backlog priorities.
Before Surge’s involvement, the application was single-tiered. Developers were encountering architecture problems that prevented them from delivering updates and value the business demanded. To allow the healthcare organization’s developers to iterate faster on future versions of the app, Surge reconfigured the platform into a three-tiered micro-service architecture, consisting of API, Logic and Angular for the frontend.
New training and tools allow healthcare organization to meet business goals
Simultaneous to the UI/UX and architecture updates, Surge engineers worked side-by-side with the organization’s developers to improve development processes, introduce and coach agile development methods, create a working backlog of application features and begin to deliver the full business value from the home wellness initiative.
To increase visibility into the organization’s development environment, Surge introduced JIRA and Confluence. This helped its developers gather business requirements and turn them into proper criteria for user stories, essential for the delivery of incremental features using agile methodology. It also provided documentation for system level architecture that the client could follow in the future.
The final application redesign and rearchitecture gave the healthcare organization a more productive and efficient application. The project also resulted in:
- Reduced time for users to access and act on patient data
- Improved quality of patient care
- Increased flexibility and lower costs to scale the application
- Greater responsiveness to business needs by development teams
- Reduced development time
- Ability to rapidly and iteratively improve the app with Agile
Frontend/backend integration
Delivered an application that met both IT and business needs for employee use and scalability.
UX design
Running design sprints in parallel with agile development reduced overall project time and maximized stakeholder participation and feedback.
Training partner
Surge simultaneously trained client developers in agile methodologies while delivering project results.
Key technologies/skills
Angular
Jira
Confluence
UX/UI
Prototyping
Design Sprints