Development of an iOS Mobile App for Healthcare Professionals

Customer

The Customer is a US healthcare provider serving patients across multiple states since 2006.

Challenge

The Customer had a custom-developed EHR system. To let their employees make use of this system on the go, when making rounds in hospitals, the Customer wanted to complement the EHR solution with an iOS mobile app. With this idea, they turned to ScienceSoft, as the Customer acknowledged the company’s ample experience in hospital mobile app development.

Solution

After a pre-discovery phase that consisted of a UX research and planning of the efforts, the development team chose Scrum with two-week iterations as their framework for managing the project. Then, ScienceSoft’s team proceeded to UI design, iOS development and back end implementation.

In 4 months, the app and its back end were not only finished but also successfully integrated with the EHR system.

For security reasons, the app itself doesn’t allow new user registration; its authentication is based only on the existing user data stored in the EHR. An employee who has access to the EHR can log in the app via:

• Simple sign-in (requiring login and password).
• Touch ID (fingerprint scanning on iOS devices).
• Face ID (requiring facial recognition on iOS devices).

The mobile app has three main features that make the daily routine of healthcare professionals easier and more consistent:

• Logging time – this feature allows a healthcare professional to input the amount of time they spent with a patient and have it automatically saved in the EHR.
• Image capturing – the app allows a physician or a nurse to take a picture of a wound, rash, or any other visible ailment. The image can be touched up with various filters right in the app and linked to a patient record in the EHR after a secure upload to the database.
• Document scanning – based on the functionality of Microsoft Office Lens, this feature allows scanning a document captured by a device camera. If a document consists of more than one page, pages can be edited individually, then bundled together and saved as a single file object.

Images taken and documents scanned by the app can be uploaded to the EHR and are automatically saved to a mobile device library, where they are stored for 30 days.

Results

The app was released in October 2018 and the Customer was completely satisfied with both the collaboration process and the final result.

Technologies and Tools

iOS: Swift 4, Objective-C, RxSwift, RxCocoa, RxAlamofire, AVFoundation, UIKit, PDF Reader, PDFGenerator, PDFKit, AlamofireImage, GPUImage, Core Image, Fabric, Crashlytics, FHIR.

Back end: ASP.NET, Web API, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, FHIR STU3, EF6, Google API.