Development of a Healthcare App for Allergy
Explore how our allergy management application enhances patient care through advanced medication tracking, symptom and environmental trigger monitoring. Our customer, a renowned pharmaceutical company, expanded their business model to include a “business-to-business” approach alongside their core drug and medical device production under their own brand. They started manufacturing medications for other medical providers and also offer them custom mobile application development to support specific patient treatment scenarios. To enable rapid and flexible app development, we created a low-code platform for our customer that allows them to rapidly construct medical applications from over 20 functional modules, like building blocks. This solution has enabled them to establish diverse partnership relations, including one with a network of clinics specializing in allergy treatment. In the following sections, we’ll go into the capabilities of an application created for this network of clinics using the low-code platform.
Healthcare Solution for Allergy Medication
Embarking on the patient’s journey with the allergy management application starts with the purchase of allergy relief nasal drops. These drops, manufactured by our customer for their partner, are presented in branded packaging. Each bottle is uniquely marked with a QR code, serving as the gateway to the app. This approach ensures that only bona fide clients, those who have actually purchased the nasal drops, gain access to the application.
The main purpose of the application is to track medication intake and monitor symptoms and triggers that may affect the condition of patients with allergies. By analyzing this accumulated data, the patient’s healthcare provider can make more informed decisions about treatment strategies. In this particular application, the trackable medication includes the previously mentioned nasal drops. However, in applications for other partners of our customer, there could be various types of medications available for tracking. Moreover, the intake of some medications can be monitored using smart medical IoT devices such as inhalers, autoinjectors, dispensers, etc., which automatically record the patient’s medication usage and transmit this data to the mobile application via Bluetooth. In the application we are discussing, the information about medication intake is manually entered by the patient.
Users have the option to set up a medication schedule within the app, enabling them to receive timely reminders for their nasal drop intake. This completes the initial setup, leading users to the app’s dashboard – a comprehensive information hub. This dashboard presents a wealth of data including weekly or monthly statistics of medication intake and symptom tracking. Recognizing the significant impact of environmental factors on allergy sufferers, the dashboard also integrates climatic information and air quality data relevant to the user’s location, sourced through an API from AccuWeather. The recorded medication intakes are meticulously logged in the medication history screen. This data is not only accessible to the user but also transmitted to the web application used by healthcare providers. Both patients and doctors can review this history, selecting specific time frames to gauge medication adherence from the inception of the app usage.
In addition to these features, the app houses a section where patients periodically fill out surveys, reporting the severity and nature of their symptoms, such as cough or runny nose. They can also note any recent exposures to potential allergens. This patient-reported data, coupled with daily climatic and air quality metrics from external services, forms a detailed timeline. As previously mentioned, this timeline is an invaluable tool for doctors accessible via the web application, aiding in identifying patient-specific patterns and refining treatment strategies.
Furthermore, the application includes educational tabs, one offering informative articles about allergies and another hosting instructional videos available directly within the app. All this content is managed through an admin panel, ensuring that the information remains current and relevant.
Application Architecture
The diagram illustrates the high-level architecture of this healthcare IT solution that facilitates interaction between users—doctors and patients—and cloud-based software components.
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Doctors access the system through a web application via a browser interface, while patients engage with a mobile application compatible with both iOS and Android devices. These applications interface with the backend infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Within the AWS ecosystem, the solution employs two primary services: AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which hosts the Microsoft SQL Server database, and AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service), which manages the containerized applications including the RESTful APIs built on the .NET framework. You can find a full and detailed description of this architecture, which is built upon AWS services, in this blog post.
HIPAA Compliance Consulting & Services
Our involvement in the allergy management app project focused on aiding our customer’s partner in preparing for a HIPAA audit. We concentrated on ensuring secure data handling between the patient app and the doctor’s web portal, leveraging AWS cloud services to meet HIPAA’s stringent security standards. A significant part of our support included assisting in the creation of detailed documentation crucial for the HIPAA audit process. By implementing the Matrix ALM system, we helped establish robust audit trails and effective permission management, key for maintaining HIPAA compliance.
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In this blog post, you’ll learn about our methods for ensuring HIPAA compliance and how we can guide you in getting your application ready for a HIPAA audit.
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