Get inspired by the transformative journey of a garage startup evolving into an enterprise, advancing healthcare through smart medical devices and technology partnerships. Discover how the development of a low-code platform catalyzed the expansion into a multi-tenant SaaS model, setting new standards in patient care and treatment efficiency.

From Childhood Game to Advanced Medical App

Our narrative begins with the story of our longstanding collaboration with our esteemed customer, a journey that embarked from their humble origins as a startup, founded by a visionary pediatric pulmonologist. Our first project together involved crafting a mobile app, akin to a game, aimed at helping children manage their asthma more effectively and engagingly.

It synced with a BLE device attached to the inhaler, recording medication use. This data was sent to a mobile app and a server component relayed it to a doctor’s app for detailed patient treatment insights.

Since inception, the startup actively sought customers and investments, engaging in exhibitions and presentations, while continuously enhancing the app through feedback. Our team helped implement these updates. A critical point was nearly halting operations due to financial strains during COVID-19, but as they say, the darkest hour is just before dawn.

Enter another player in our story: a large pharmaceutical corporation specializing in producing drugs under its brand and licensed to partners in branded packaging. They also manufactured medical devices like blood pressure monitors, thermometers, inhalers, etc. However, most devices lacked data transmission capabilities. They envisioned transforming drug packaging into a smart, interactive device, enhancing patient care by tracking and transmitting key data like medication timings and dosages to patient and doctor apps, thereby offering a more competitive product. Familiar, right?

Returning to our startup, you might guess what happened next. A large company, seeking to expand into this area, acquired the startup for its existing groundwork. Post-merger, the startup, now a department, enhanced its app, aligning with the company’s vision of integrated patient care and developing software for the company’s smart medical devices. This acquisition led to an expanded line of smart medical products. We, in effect, became part of this new department as an externally dedicated technical team, upholding the company’s vision with technical support. Let’s now look at the first solution we developed in collaboration with our new customer: an app for asthma patients of all ages, not just children.

Solution Overview

Everything begins with more advanced models of smart spirometers (devices for diagnostics, measuring the volume and strength of exhaled airflow) and Metered Dose Inhalers (MDI). One of the smart inhaler models can not only register the fact of a patient taking medication, the time of administration, dosage, and other data, but also, thanks to additional sensors, it can evaluate the correctness of inhaler usage during medication intake across five different criteria. The firmware for this device was developed by our firmware engineering team. Then, information from these smart devices is transmitted to a connected mobile device in an app, and from there to the backend, which we built on AWS services, to ultimately reach a specialized web portal where the patient’s treating physician can view all this information and take appropriate measures.Now, doctors have much more information at their disposal than in the startup version of the application for doctors. The functionality of the mobile application has significantly expanded, which means the volume of collected data did so as well. There are various dynamic forms for surveys, the ability to track symptoms and triggers, and moreover – to overlay these on data about the quality of the surrounding air and climatic factors over time. All of this is visualized to see day-to-day changes, which helps doctors more easily identify patterns and factors related to a specific patient and select the best treatment strategies. This is just a small part of the functionality. We will share more about this application in this blog post.

Strategy for Scaling Success

This innovative solution quickly gained popularity among both patients and physicians. Capitalizing on this success, our customer embarked on an ambitious plan to expand its reach. The strategy was twofold: First, to develop a range of similar comprehensive treatments for various diseases, which would include the creation of advanced smart devices capable of administering a variety of medications, from oral drops to intravenous auto-injectors. Second, to market these groundbreaking solutions to other healthcare providers using a White labeling approach. To achieve these goals, a versatile platform became essential, one that could facilitate the rapid and straightforward development of new mobile applications. This platform needed to offer extensive customization options, both in functionality and design. We will now explore our journey of developing such a platform.

Application Platform: Software as a Service (SaaS)

Imagine a scenario where a network of medical clinics wants to release a medication under its own brand, and they turn to our customer for assistance. Our customer supplies them not only with the medication in branded packaging but also includes a smart device integrated with an accompanying application. This app is customized to the clinic’s brand and implements a patient service scenario specific to that clinic. Alternatively, our customer might launch a similar solution under their own brand, comprising both the medication and an application for treating a specific disease. To bring this concept to life, we and the customer concluded that we should develop a low-code platform based on an existing client-server application for asthma treatment. This platform would enable the creation of customized app versions with minimal effort, tailored to the visual and functional requirements of each individual partner.Building such a low-code platform from scratch with all bells and whistles is quite an undertaking that would take at least a year. However, we didn’t have that time. We needed to provide a quick solution to the market, buying the time for enhancements and optimizations for later. Our solution was to use an existing application with a monolithic architecture as a template for new applications intended for our customer’s partners. Within the confines of this monolithic architecture, we implemented a quick version of modular separation of the application’s functional components, fully aware that we would need to address the resultant technical debt. Subsequently, we began a gradual, step-by-step migration from the still-monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture. This involved extracting functional blocks from the monolith one by one and transforming them into separate, loosely coupled services. Detailed information about this migration process from monolith to microservices can be found here.

Final Chapter

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Wrapping up our garage startup story into an enterprise platform is just one chapter of our adventure. What came next? A whole lot more projects. Our client started racking up partners, all drawn to the solution we crafted together, each with their own set of needs. This surge in partnerships rapidly expanded our scope of work. We’re rolling out a series of blog posts to give you a peek into some of these collaborative projects. Each one highlights how we’ve adapted our low-code platform to meet our partners’ unique requirements, continually beefing up its capabilities for even more partnerships down the road.

A key aspect of most of these projects has been integrating a variety of connected medical smart devices. We’re not just talking about hooking up devices; we’re developing custom software and firmware solutions, making extensive use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to ensure seamless connectivity and functionality.

Explore the stories that catch your eye below and discover how we navigate the challenges and innovations in each project:

At this point, our customer has partners who brand the solution as their own (white labeling). In the following posts of this series, we’ll discuss how we assist in enhancing the low-code platform’s features to meet the unique functional needs of some of these partners, whenever needed. This involves both the functionality of the apps and integrating connected medical devices into our customer’s ecosystem.

Stay tuned for these exciting journeys:

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