Healthcare Platform with AI Care Suggestions for Patients with Obesity

Customer

The Customer is a US-based startup launched by a global team of medical professionals.

Challenge

The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the advancements in digital health technologies prompted the Customer to develop a medical platform for patients with obesity and the healthcare practitioners working in this field.

The Customer’s team came up with a startup idea: a mobile platform that helps patients maintain healthy eating habits, prepare for and recover from a bariatric surgery, and provides healthcare practitioners with real-time data about their patients’ progress.

The Customer decided to start with MVP development to build up the user base and get feedback early on. So, the Customer was looking for a vendor proficient in medical software development.

Solution

Trusting ScienceSoft’s decades-long experience in healthcare IT, the Customer turned to us for MVP design and development. For the project, ScienceSoft assembled a team comprising a project manager, a senior business analyst, a UX/UI designer, a solution architect, 2 senior back-end developers, a senior front-end developer, 2 senior Xamarin developers, a data science expert, 2 QA engineers, a DevOps engineer, and a regulatory consultant.

The project started with a thorough analysis of the market and the Customer’s goals. After that, ScienceSoft’s team conceptualized the product idea, elicited the functional and technical requirements for the platform, and outlined the core feature set.

Then, the solution architect designed a microservices-based architecture to enable easy deployment of future platform modules, provide the needed integration capabilities, and ensure high scalability of the solution.

The product design stage took 1 month. Within the next 5 months, ScienceSoft performed Agile MVP development, testing, integration, and stabilization. The delivered HIPAA-compliant MVP included:

1. A cross-platform mobile application for patients with obesity enabling:

• Vitals tracking, patient symptoms monitoring, physical activity tracking (via integration with health trackers like HealthKit, Google Fit).
• Consumed calories counting (via integration with Nutritionix).
• Personalized suggestions for a healthy lifestyle, a diet plan, a successful rehabilitation after a bariatric surgery.
• Instant messaging to get advice on post-operative care from the assigned healthcare professionals.
• Gamification: individual challenges for patients to help shape healthy habits (e.g., take at least 5,000 steps a day).
• A payment module (payments via a card, Apple Pay and Google Pay).

2. A cross-platform mobile application for doctors involved in bariatric care and obesity treatment enabling:

• Real-time access to patient health data (e.g., weight, calorie consumption, symptoms, vitals, physical activity) and patient progress reports.
• Instant messaging to reach out to the assigned patients with treatment recommendations.

3. A web admin panel for platform management.

4. A shared back end and a central data storage for the platform data (e.g., ePHI, chat records, personalized patient recommendations).

5. An AI engine for smart suggestions (e.g., personalized diet tips).

When the development and stabilization were completed, ScienceSoft’s team deployed the fully functional MVP to the AWS cloud. ScienceSoft provided the Customer with the complete software documentation needed for further MVP evolution (i.e., developing additional web apps, integrating the platform with EMR systems of partnering health providers).

Results

Within 6 months, the Customer received a ready-to-market MVP of a healthcare platform for patients with obesity. Pleased with the collaboration outcomes, the Customer proceeded with the MVP launch and marketing the platform among the target audience.

Technologies and Tools

AWS, Node.js, Python, TypeScript, React.js, FeathersJS, Xamarin, MongoDB, HTML, SCSS, Nginx, Docker, Nutritionix, SciPy, LightGBM.