An academic healthcare system develops a digital tool that suggests clinical treatment options for patients based on medical history.
SITUATION
Our client was looking for assistance with digital product development to free up their development team to focus on other critical development activities. They wanted to reduce their digital tool backlog and created a pilot project to determine whether it was feasible for Apex to take on a larger role in the project. The backlog included several clinical calculators, which would suggest a course of treatment for patients based on the patient’s medical history.
SOLUTION
Apex assembled a hybrid onshore and nearshore team to deliver the clinical outcome calculators. Our team was comprised of a small scrum team (lead clinical BSA, team lead, Sr. QA, Sr. developer, and mid-level developer) to work independently following Agile methodology following the below process:
Completed the project $47K under budget, saving 15K+ development hours
- Elicit calculator requirements from physician/provider sponsor as needed
- Develop questionnaire in JSON format
- Generate Stubs for implementing the business logic
- Design a display for questions using the JSON file
- Implement the algorithm from the Clinical Knowledge Expert
- Perform end-to-end testing
- Perform deployment to Azure via Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines
RESULTS
During our partnership with the client, the team was able to build four calculators completing the work $47K under budget and saving over 15K development hours. Our work helped the client update some of their existing calculators by adding the latest business rules, changing the logic, removing deprecated information, and adding new results according to the most recent clinical studies. The cervical cancer calculator was particularly impactful due to its uniqueness in the market. After the release of this calculator, the clinicians were amazed at the number of different treatment options they received in comparison to similar online calculators. As a result of the client’s satisfaction with this pilot program, Apex has been engaged for additional projects to reduce the client’s digital tool backlog.
