Healthcare EHR System

EHR goes back to origins in the 1970s when The United States Department of Veterans Affairs has launched the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP). Prototypes of similar systems were developed and earlier. Still, only this system has received access to federal resources, which allowed it to grow and evolve. It was a massive step for EHR system development and healthcare software.

There are many solutions for such software in the US market, as well as companies providing such services as medical app development.

However, the client (here and after we will call it Health Care Solutions or HCS) hired LightClix , which has been working on innovations in the Health Care sector for several years in collaboration with doctors and specialists from the Health Care sector.

The HCS hypothesis was that if the data is visualized, doctors will interact faster with the program and all software opportunities.

During the research, HCS found that many modern EHR systems are not entirely focused on doctors’ needs. In turn, this may prevent doctors from providing better care for patients, and in cases when it comes to an emergency, saving many lives.

HCS challenged LightClix with a very ambitious goal to transform a lot of different data about the patient’s health into an accessible visualized view. We had to create a visualization of an EHR system that will enable the doctor to quickly explore the patient’s history.

Due to industry’s age and a large number of legacy in this technology and systems, such platforms have several problems that complicate things. In particular, difficulties arise when doctors have to quickly act with the system, for example, in an emergency room. Problems also occur when the doctor should deal with patients with complex and long medical histories.

As usual, every project starts with the discovery stage. The discovery allows our team to get acquainted in detail with this project, and to look at it from a different angle.

The Main Problems for the client were: 

1. A complicated structure: A lot of data in the system consists of separate files from different sources, which require a lot of time to work with.
2. Lack of Vision for the ‘big picture’:The information in the programs has a complicated structure, so doctors should take a long time to analyze. There is no way to get a quick summary in this system to understand what to concentrate on.
3. Complex Interaction: For doctors, it may be hard to interact with the new functions and new software.
4. Tablets and mobile devices integration: The system itself was designed before the “Mobile first” era.
5. Too much obsolete code and duplicates in many files.

During our work on this project, we have made a rule – all the work should be done via Scrum (2 weeks sprints). And with the help of Product manager on LightClix side the following was achieved:

1. Timeline of Documents. All the Documentation including use cases was created along the development process to not lose any nuances.
2. The Flexibility of System. We came up with the solution that collects all the documents for comparison. This panel makes it possible to save documents separately, and filter it by any parameters. It was achieved with the help of Elastic Search and some server configurations.
3. Communication Between the Doctors and Patient. As part of the project, we decided to make the additional interaction between the doctor and the patient outside the hospital, monitor his/her health, and take medications. We have created an app where the patient will be able to tell about their well-being and get in touch with a doctor and make an appointment.
4. Clear Architecture. With the help of our CTO supervision, we were maintaining and implementing highest coding standards followed by unit tests creation, code reviews, best practices implementation and use of custom plugins not everywhere but only when necessary.
5.  Mobile / Tablet Version. With the help of our Senior Graphics UX Designer we completely restructured the interface. We have created a visual architecture that, at a glance, helps the user to identify the interactive elements and the ones that are of primary interest.

To Sum Up 

This was not our first experience working on highly loaded systems of enterprise caliber, including SaaS solutions and Big Data. But we consider this experience to be one of the most important ones. It allowed us to work with the interfaces on which people’s lives depended and see what problems their users face. We made sure that we can work with such projects, and the team has a sufficient background to conduct the discovery and design of such systems. Special thanks to the HCS team for allowing us to get such experience and opportunity to work on such projects.