One of our US healthcare clients approached us to create a reliable and secure data platform for their application. After examining their data infrastructure and goals, DB Best came up with a cloud-based solution to build questionnaires based application, to meet the customer’s needs.
An application guiding your lifestyle
Our customer envisioned an application to help people suffering from chronic diseases live full, unobstructed lives.
For sufferers of these life-long illnesses, keeping track of their symptoms and bodily health, as well as following their doctor’s advice, is key to overcoming their disease. However, we all know what happens. As soon as patients start to feel better, their regular exercise, healthy eating, and commitment to a good night’s sleep go out the window. As they slip back into their old lifestyle their illness makes an unwelcome return.
That is why the idea of constant observation and tracking via an app appeals to people. It helps users improve their health long after they’ve stopped seeing symptoms.
Closer to the point: track, learn, ask
The idea of the app is to guide users, based on data of their daily activities, and current symptoms. To make all of this possible, we leveraged in-built questionnaires to collect, track, and organize all of their answers. The application utilizes various questionaries, from simple ones about health to detailed surveys contributing to life-saving medical research. As users answer more questions, the tracker within the application notes the patient’s condition, giving them simple metrics and a timeline of their health.
The overview of their health, portrayed by a variety of easy-to-understand graphs, gives users a holistic view of their illness. Tracking over time, patients are able to chart their improving or worsening condition. As the app continues to monitor their illness, it can also suggest advice on different steps to take.
The app also gives users the chance to ask a specialist’s recommendation. By integrating expert advice directly into the app, our client hopes to avoid the patient’s searching the internet for an answer. Medical professionals have warned against the popularity of ‘Dr. Google’ as it often leads to inaccurate advice and treatment plans.
Along with all of these features, the app provides users with a daily dose of inspiration and recommendations. Thus, we have an application that gives users control over their lives in an easy to access, secure space.
The technological solution
DB Best leveraged Amazon Web Services to build the platform which stores the questionaries. Stored and organized at the back end, the patient’s data must be absolutely secure, as well as encrypted at the point of data transmission.
The question of GDPR and HIPAA compliance is a hot one today. From the very beginning, we had to make sure that our app met the strict security requirements for healthcare data. That determined our choice of services and technologies.
To guarantee full GDPR and HIPAA compliance for the users’ data in the cloud, DB Best utilized Datica solutions. We encrypted all of the users’ data submitted via questionnaires.
We leveraged Auth0 to store the patient’s personal data such as names and diagnosis in the form of tokens in the back end.
To ensure private and secure communications between doctors and users, our team utilized the RabbitMQ message broker that is a proven service to combine with Datica. RabbitMQ allowed for safety exchanging data among the Docker containers within the application.
Another critical feature in this application was an effective search engine. Users should be able to quickly and efficiently locate their data in the huge database containing the doctors’ recommendations and lifestyle advice. That is an immense amount of data to handle. We leveraged the distributed search and analytics engine Elasticsearch to help the users quickly find information related to their questions.
To save the users’ efforts of filling in the questionnaires every day, we utilized the Validic service, allowing users to connect their fitness devices. Thus, the users don’t have to fill in their data manually. The app allows users to easily upload health data from wearable fitness devices such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, and Apple HealthKit and makes the app even easier to use.
The future of this technological solution
Our project has already become a platform for several technological solutions. We can transform this solution at your request in any field of medical science.
We developed a truly modular architecture of a secure healthcare data platform. Basically, we can have any number of questionaries, of any complexity, to aid medical research. The system will crunch the data and deliver it in an easy to understand form. And, of course, all the data will be completely secured in the cloud.
Why choose DB Best to build your healthcare applications
More and more hospitals and research institutions are developing applications to treat and guide their patients, as well as collect statistical data. Healthcare applications differ for every purpose, yet up to now, less than 10% of hospitals are utilizing even digital health records. The highly technological solutions at affordable budgets mean that there is now a huge market starving for great products.
We here, at DB Best have years of experience developing products for healthcare institutions. We know how important our customers take their patient’s privacy and security. Here is a huge benefit of the “out-of-box” solution we offer. It is well-tested and proved with a wide range of users. Contact DB Best to build your own secure and reliable healthcare solution.
