This collaboration includes our customer’s partner company which has developed a specialized treatment cream for vitiligo. With our help, our customer has built a mobile app to complement this innovative treatment. Our customer, a pharmaceutical company, excels in producing packaging with IoT integration for medications under its own brand as well as under the brands of its partners through custom orders. Additionally, the company offers its partners quick development of mobile applications that would complement the treatment process with the partner’s medication.
Our customer utilizes a low-code platform we developed to quickly and flexibly create apps for their partners. Sometimes, the partners’ needs exceed the platform’s existing capabilities, prompting us to develop additional functionalities. In this post, we’ll explain how we’ve updated the platform to accommodate specific requests from partners, focusing on new features we added for an engaging vitiligo treatment application.
Application requirements
The focus of this project is a pharmaceutical company that has pioneered a treatment cream specifically for vitiligo, a condition that affects skin pigmentation. This company, a partner to our customer, is not just on the frontline of developing dermatological treatments; they are also at the vanguard of integrating technology with medicine to enhance patient outcomes. Their goal is clear: to provide a treatment that goes beyond the physical application of a cream. To achieve this, they required a mobile application that would offer a comprehensive support system for patients. The app was envisioned as a tool to assist with the consistent application of the cream, adherence to a prescribed treatment regimen, and to facilitate a direct communication channel between patients and healthcare providers.
The partner specified that the application should be user-friendly, allowing patients to easily navigate through its features without extensive guidance. Yet, it had to be powerful enough to manage the intricacies of personal treatment plans, track application frequency, and visually document the treatment’s effectiveness over time. In realizing this partner’s vision, our customer planned to leverage their platform—a system developed by us—to swiftly and flexibly create new applications. This low-code platform empowers our customer to craft new applications for their partners with significantly less developer involvement. Within the admin panel, the administrator simply selects from over 20 pre-developed functional modules that are necessary for the new application and configures them according to the functional needs of the specific partner. They also tailor the application’s appearance to match the style of the brand or the preferences of the partner.
The vision set forth by our customer’s partner required the integration of functionalities not yet present within the existing platform framework. In response, we crafted these specific features and enriched the platform, broadening its capabilities for this and future collaborations. We introduced a new medication type within the “Medicine” module, specifically accommodating the vitiligo treatment cream. Additionally, we innovated a novel feature — a photo diary module — enabling patients to document their treatment progress through photographs or videos, which the app could then compile into a visual collage over time.
Healthcare Solution for Vitiligo Treatment
This journey begins at the doctor’s office, where the patient and doctor collaboratively devise a treatment plan. This plan is recorded in a web application developed by us, specifically for medical professionals, allowing doctors to monitor patient-reported data through the mobile app. Once the treatment plan is established, the patient’s journey continues with registering in the mobile application. Upon registration, the first step for the user is to select the treatment type involving the vitiligo cream. Subsequently, they schedule the timing for the application of the first and second doses of the cream within the day. Adhering to the partner’s directive, we have limited the daily dosage schedule to a maximum of two applications. This limitation stems from the partner’s emphasis on optimal and safe usage of the cream, reducing the risk of any potential side effects from overuse.
Our customer’s partner placed great emphasis on informing patients about the correct and safe use of medications. Hence, at their request, we added a warning banner to most of the application’s screens. By tapping on this banner, patients receive crucial information in a pop-up window about the main safety rules and complete instructions for the medication’s use.
When it’s time to apply the cream, the user receives a push notification, applies the cream, and then logs this action in the app. These logs are stored in the medication history section for the user to review and are also sent to the doctor’s dashboard, enabling them to oversee the patient’s adherence to the schedule.
An integral feature of the app is the Treatment Diary, where patients can choose to document their journey through photos or videos. This feature is designed to ensure consistency in the documentation process — patients are guided to capture the affected skin areas under similar lighting conditions and angles to accurately reflect treatment progress. The app allows patients to either take pictures or videos directly or upload them from their gallery. Tagging options are available for specifying body parts in photos and videos, enabling patients to create separate collages or time-lapses for each tagged area, visually documenting the healing process for each specific part of the body over time. This feature not only aids patients in tracking their progress but also enables healthcare providers to visually assess the effectiveness of the treatment.
We’ve previously noted the data-sharing capabilities between the patient mobile app and the web application for doctors, indicating the presence of a server-side component in the system. We developed the backend of this system using AWS cloud services. For an in-depth exploration of the server-side architecture, we encourage you to refer to a dedicated blog post that goes into these details.
HIPAA Audit Readiness Services
In crafting the vitiligo treatment app, we prioritized HIPAA compliance to protect patient information. The secure data exchange between the patient app and the doctor’s web portal, powered by AWS cloud services, was designed with stringent security measures. New features like the photo diary were developed to align with HIPAA’s encryption and access control standards. A Matrix ALM system ensured efficient audit trails and permission management, integral for maintaining continuous compliance and preparing for HIPAA audits.
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Explore our approach to HIPAA compliance and how we can assist in preparing your application for a HIPAA audit in this blog post.
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