Mobile App Designed for Comprehensive Care Coordination

Customer

The Customer is a leading US-based provider of software solutions for assisted living facilities.

Challenge

The Customer wanted to help their clients to improve and simplify care coordination for assisted living facilities. In general, care coordination can be impeded by the distributed nature of residents’ health information kept in various health centers, pharmacies, and laboratories. This introduces serious risks for the residents’ condition and adversely affects the quality of medical services.

The Customer commissioned ScienceSoft to create a concept and implement an app that would allow safer and more efficient resident care providing a comprehensive picture of residents’ medical record to the entire care team (doctors, nurses, social workers, patient navigators, and family members) and patients themselves.

Solution

To create an application for truly patient-centered care, our BA specialists came up with the following concept of key functionality for the future mobile app:

• Health data consolidation. The application brings together and displays in a convenient standardized format all the medical information about a resident (such as vitals, medications, allergies, X-ray images, lab results) to their doctors, nurses, social workers, authorized patient navigators, and family members.
• Care management. The entire care team gets relevant info on the current treatment plan, a resident’s condition and has a possibility to set up alerts to learn about all changes regarding resident’s health condition and treatment plan in real time.
• Patient involvement. Residents have all the health information in one place, add new caregivers and determine the information they want to share.
• Secure messaging. The entire care team can safely communicate with each other and share relevant info via instant messages.

After the concept’s approval, the app based on it was successfully implemented and deployed and quickly established itself as a credible, reliable, and convenient way to coordinate care. As a result, the Customer decided to expand the scope of its use beyond assisted living facilities and strengthen patient involvement. To cater for a wider range of medical facilities and to ensure the app’s high competitiveness, ScienceSoft’s BA team enriched it with the following additional features:

• Assessment. Regular self-assessment forms for patients so that the doctors and the rest of the care team can remotely keep track on the changes in a patient’s condition.
• Marketplace. An interactive map will allow patients to search quickly for facilities, doctors, and pharmacies by distance and services available.
• Appointment. Patients can quickly and easily handle the appointment scheduling in case of need.
• Follow-up. The system will track and inform doctors, patients and the authorized rest of the care teams about the number of follow-ups undertaken.
• Reports. With the help of dashboards and diagrams, health providers will be able to get valuable insights into the interdependence of changes in a patient's health and various factors, such as drug intake or treatment procedures.

Results

ScienceSoft’s BA team created the concept of a mobile application for delivering patient-centered care in assisted living facilities. The app based on this concept allows consolidating all the necessary information for a care team and patients themselves, ensuring timely updates of patient data and encouraging patient involvement. This functionality was extended to be used in other medical facilities. And the Customer believes that new features, such as assessment, marketplace, appointments, follow-ups, and reports) will bring strong competitive advantage to a new application in its market niche.

Methodologies

Business process modeling, scope modeling, information modeling, UX prototyping.