Paving the path for a leading health-tech company to provide better healthcare solutions to patients

They collaborates with exceptional therapists and psychiatrists to provide mental health services. However, owing to the lack of in-house technical capabilities, they were facing a variety of challenges with outdated and inefficient existing systems. To cater to the growing needs of their users, they needed to move away from manually tackling all operations to a modern web-based platform. They wanted a platform that could solve for two clear objectives: one, to improve the client's experience and second  - to make the therapist’s ‘everyday’ better.

Laying down a new product roadmap strategy was paramount in order to build a platform from the ground up.  Having observed Symv’s extensive experience in the Healthcare space, they approached us. They wanted to simplify their appointment booking system and were quite impressed with our expertise in product engineering, our proven technical capabilities in building platforms from the ground up and consulting start-ups to scale up.

We were able to list down the scope of the project and the concern areas which needed immediate attention:

• Working with off-the-shelf tools such as Acuity Scheduler required manual interventions, offered limited flexibility and a mediocre user experience while scheduling and managing appointments. This led to issues such as appointment cancellations which impacted revenue and slowed down growth.
• Owing to the existing tech stack, the platform lacked ways to gather, process, and leverage data. This posed a huge challenge for their leadership team, which wanted to actively make data-driven decisions.
• The existing EHR system was complex and didn’t serve all requirements from a billing standpoint which resulted in increased manual operations for internal teams.
• The patients were unable to get clarity around billing, such as payment options, co-pay options and insurance claims.

Considering the old platform catered to tens of thousands of daily users, the transition to new systems needed to be carefully executed without affecting the traffic. Another big challenge was to ensure that data and personal information were safe and managed carefully. The complex EHR and compliance matters also needed to be taken into account while developing the new platform.

The client tasked Symv with rolling out a digital booking and intake management platform, and other custom tools for therapists. They wanted to launch their platform and boost the internal team's proficiency and performance. The project needed to follow a strict timeline - with a zero-delay delivery commitment.  

We assigned the project to a versatile scrum team comprising Product Managers, Data Engineers, Frontend and Backend Developers, Quality Analysts, DevOps Engineers, and support personnel. They meticulously chose the tech stack and codebase, keeping in mind the massive scale of users and the issues that could arrive during the transition.

The delivery and launch of the B2C apps were divided into 3 phases - namely a) Developing MVP; b) Setting it up to scale c) Integrating EHR. In this three-part framework, we also cover the most important considerations that led to automating processes. Kicking off the first phase involved evaluating the existing tech stack and identifying the EHR system that would work best for the health tech platform.

Phase 1: MVP Launch

Before partnering with Symv, the client managed most of the appointment scheduling as well as operations manually. The process involved a patient scheduling an appointment, the customer support agent updating the schedule in the EHR systems and then sending a notification to the patient, which took hours. This also posed a lot of dependency on customer support agents leading to manual errors and drop-offs in case the therapists needed to reschedule the sessions.

• The team carefully chose the tech stack - NodeJS (NestJS framework) and React (Next.Js framework) to build the app, AWS SQS, Fargate, and Kubernetes for hosting it. We deployed third-party tools like Postgres RDS, REDIS, Windows Servers, Mailgun, Stripe, Twilio, Rudderstack, pVerify  - which could help build and scale the platform quickly.
• The solution included two apps - The Patient Server (Core) app and the EHR app.  We ensured that the ecosystem is loosely coupled, allowing it to be independently scalable.
• The patient app enabled scheduling/managing appointments and maintained the insurance data in the system. While the EHR app acted as a link between the core app and the third-party EHR portal.
• AWS SQS loosely coupled both apps and offered seamless inter-service communication. It ensured that the information for all events on the core app was sent to the EHR app, which then updated the data on the EHR portal.
• We evaluated the build vs buy approach and arrived at integrating a third-party tool - Retool. It was used to feed the data into the system, improve the UI/UX for the dashboards and aid our faster go-to-market plan.
• Our strategy was to develop and roll out the MVP quickly in order to test the market. The MVP was developed to ensure that it could be scaled to handle user requests for multiple locations while reducing dependency on customer support agents.
• We first rolled out the MVP to the location with minimal traffic. We migrated the traffic from the manual system to a new system to expand to newer geographies.
• The MVP helped replace the long and tedious manual process and brought it down to 3 simple steps for patients- search for therapists, add personal information and proceed to billing.
• This phase also focused on rebranding and redesigning the platforms - making UI more intuitive, integrated SMS systems as well as the consent management processes - which were highly critical.

Phase 2: Launching Support Dashboard, scaling to additional locations and integrating data analytics

• In the next phase, we were focused on delivering connected experiences to the users and scaling to new locations.  We set up the Customer Support Dashboard and further improved the Patient Dashboard by adding new functionalities and integrated data analytics.
• For Patient Dashboard, we added more counselling options, including medication psychiatry and family therapy.
• We developed a Support Dashboard which served as an admin and aided customer support agents in managing patients' profiles, rescheduling appointments, feed in billing as well as insurance information via Pverify.
• We put together an intuitive martech stack with data analytics tools like Heap Analytics, Looker, Google Analytics and Rudderstack to help the leadership team make data-driven decisions.
• We created processes to automatically route appointments to the therapist and added features to ensure they could accept/reschedule as per their availability.
  

Phase 3: Integrating EHR System

• We ran pilot integrations around the EHR system with internal teams to understand how the system is configured, and the challenges with existing EHRs.
• One big challenge was with data migration which was causing duplication. We noticed discrepancies in storing data in the EHR portal and our EHR app. To resolve this, we used the sync and reverse sync method, ensuring a seamless data transfer.
• The platform integrated with the new EHR system was then launched for a few states, to get feedback and identify if there were any further challenges.
• The platform was then made live - nationwide.

Currently, we are working closely with them around the growth and stabilization of operations. Since we followed a very aggressive strategy to roll out the new system and integrated data analytics, we have seen a significant decrease in drop-off rates.