How to Simplify Medical Equipment Delivery for Patients

The modern healthcare sector is filled with numerous solutions addressing a multitude of requirements. Depending on the niche, these demands vary yet create a lot of unnecessary stress for the patients and healthcare providers. One of the challenges in the industry comes with receiving the necessary medical equipment and tracking the status of the delivery for patients.

Our American client contacted the Agiliway team to help them enhance their existing healthcare solution, make it more scalable, and give the necessary usability to the target users, primarily, insulin-dependent patients. In the article, we are sharing our experience with enhancing the product for simplified medical equipment delivery and adding new functionality to the solution.

What Are the Healthcare Project’s Core Requirements?

There may seem to be many solutions in healthcare, but there is much to be added and/or improved to make the industry inclusive for people with insulin-dependent diabetes. Our client’s focus is to provide an opportunity for patients with diabetes to timely and regularly receive the necessary equipment.

The current system has four main portals for Admin, Distributor, Manufacturer, and Provider. There is also a separate Patient dashboard for both Provider and Distributor to handle Patients.

The Agiliway team’s scope of tasks on the projects included

• Ensuring the system product is compliant with US legislation (HIPAA, SOC2, etc.);
• Integration with different systems to transfer orders and their details for multiple purposes, e.g., data for tax reports, billing, billing, and payment systems;
• Setting up the solution for digitizing faxes;
• Development of dashboards for manufacturer portal.

This is an ongoing project; hence, the system is still undergoing multiple enhancements and changes.

What Changes Were Made to the Healthcare Platform?

The main goal of the solution is to reduce the time for durable medical equipment (DME) supply and delivery to patients. After a healthcare specialist’s appointment, a patient gets prescribed for the use of a certain DME. To help patients track the delivery stages, our client came up with a solution that simplifies that process for all participants of the process: healthcare providers, manufacturers, distributors, and patients.

The client came to Agiliway with a partially ready product – a completed Admin portal (for platform management) and parts of the Provider portal (for healthcare service providers). The Agiliway development team hopped on board to finish the Provider portal and create Distributor (for distributors of the DME) and Manufacturer (for DME manufacturers) portals.

The system is also accessible to the patients as they receive SMS or email notifications with the order status (delivery time, location, etc.). Another target user of the system is the Client, i.e., insurance companies, that make payments (full or partial compensation) for the ordered DME.

Among the most recent changes and enhancements in the system, the development team:

• Set up fax connection: integration with Single Wire service that helps to digitize faxes. Since the data is sensitive, it was vital to avoid misuse of the PHI data. For this reason, the AWS’ S3 bucket was integrated, where the link to the PDF file was encoded/encrypted, and later sent to whoever it may concern.
• Optimized AWS expenses: The client paid a significant amount of money for one live AWS environment. Our team contributed to reducing this spending significantly and now the client pays less for three live environments. The system is quite simple, does not require an in-house maintenance specialist, is completely HIPAA compliant, and is scalable (this is important for further business growth).
• Integrated a billing system for distributors: The created orders synchronize within both the client’s system and the billing system. This simplifies the documentation management process and allows the generation of reports on payments.
• Created dashboard for manufacturers: statistics on each distributor, tracking the distribution specifics based on different indicators, i.e., sales numbers, product declines and reasons for it, onboarding of new patients, regions, and insurance company types.
• An NPI Registry integration allows the users from the Distributor APP to choose a specialist from a nationwide list of Professionals, having their data set automatically by providing just the NPI Number.
• The SMS notification is implemented in the Staging environment and emails are sent to a special channel in a messenger for testing purposes.

The current monolith system is planned to change to a microservice architecture. This decision will help our client to swiftly adapt to potential changes in technology, legislation, etc., and save time and costs on development and further maintenance.

The technology stack utilized in the product development includes PHP, Laravel for Backend, React for Frontend, and AWS as a cloud environment.

To Summarize

The current project aims at simplifying life for insulin-dependent patients, ensuring timely delivery of much-needed equipment and medication refills. Automation of the processes has become a great solution for patients and healthcare service providers, distributors, manufacturers, as well as insurance companies.

This is a complex system that helps track the status of the equipment ordered and generates reports and sales data for the equipment manufacturers, making it a win-win for all platform users.

Over the years, Agiliway has been involved in multiple solutions for the healthcare industry. Having extensive experience in technology and healthcare sector specifics has allowed us to partner with one of the game-changing solutions entering the US market.

With our help, the client saves a significant amount of time, effort, and money during the development and further maintenance processes. If you are looking for a reliable partner with hands-on experience in the healthcare industry, the Agiliway team is willing to help you.

READ ALSO: Healthcare management solution for keeping tabs on both health and expenses