Children’s Hospital & Medical Center Selects QAT Global for Mobile App Dev

Children's Hospital Mobile App

Children’s Hospital & Medical Center Selects QAT Global for Mobile App Dev

Children's Hospital Mobile App
Last Updated: February 20, 20244.6 min readCategories: Healthcare & Life Sciences
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Children’s Hospital & Medical Center Selects QAT Global for Mobile App Development

Progressive Web Application Development

Customer Snapshot

  • Healthcare – Children’s Hospital & Medical Center
  • Department of Pediatrics
  • US Location

Key Differentiators

  • Distributed team development
  • Offshore development without access to PHI
  • Agile software development with Scrum

Solution Snapshot

  • Electronic Clinical Decision Support tool as a mobile app
  • Progressive web application
  • Downloadable from iOS and Android app stores
  • Full offline capabilities
  • Client maintainable content

Technologies/Tools Used

  • Azure
  • .NET Core
  • Angular with Material Design with Bootstrap
  • Progressive Web App
  • PostgreSQL
  • REST API
  • Automation testing

The Challenge

Children’s Hospital & Medical Center expressed interest in developing a mobile application to provide medical professionals and other user groups with an easy-to-use clinical decision support tool that would help standardize care. Users would have fast access to expert advice by exploring pathways. Pathways are a set of guidelines/questions and expert recommendations.

The primary requirement of the project was to enable administrative users to manage existing pathways and create new pathways independently. Being able to make these kinds of content updates without a technical development team was essential as there is a continual need to provide updated best practices and address evolving health issues.  Other essential requirements were to provide robust analytics and the ability for each client to custom brand the platform.

The timeline for the project was aggressive, then that timeline was shortened significantly with the arrival of Covid-19. Children’s approached QAT Global with an urgent request to accelerate the first release to support a Covid-19 Symptom Checker that enables parents to better understand the symptoms of coronavirus with their children. This initial version was delivered two months ahead of schedule.

The idea around the Covid-19 Symptom Checker and the very short timeline required significant collaboration between Children’s and QAT Global. This, in turn, required QAT Global to dive deep into the requirements to present various options that would shorten the timeline.  The collaboration was outstanding, and the initial project was delivered two months before the previously scheduled release, using an agile, iterative development methodology.

Children’s Hospital Mobile App Solution

The QAT Global team architected, designed, and developed the Electronic Clinical Decision Support (ECDS) platform using a distributed development team. The new platform provides evidence-based practice recommendations and delivers a robust ability to capture statistics and analytics to determine the impact of the tool on decisions, practices, and outcomes.

The solution is a single progressive web application deployed as a mobile app. It is downloadable from the iOS and Android app stores and is also accessible from a web browser. QAT Global rapidly delivered a high-quality platform complete with test automation for Children’s using Agile software development with Scrum.

Children's Hospital Mobile App

Interestingly, the initial vision from Children’s for a user-controlled ECDS platform was quickly delivered on its promise to be easily updatable by administrative users. This key functionality was put to use in the development of the Covid-19 Symptom Checker, which was designed and implemented without custom programming using the platform’s administrative features.

The progressive web app supports full offline mode and requires no internet connection. This solution also maximized the amount of shared code and kept the cost down by delivering a single application that provides the flexibility of a native iOS and Android app but includes access using a web URL. This enhanced the consistency between the mobile platforms, simplified the infrastructure, and reduced the resources required to build and maintain the application.

QAT Global’s Approach

The product consists of three main components, the User Application, Admin Backend, and Admin Frontend.

User Application

The User Application is fully responsive, allowing the app to scale for any device size seamlessly. On the first use of the app, users are prompted with a survey that customizes their experience.

The original target users for the app were rural caregivers who do not otherwise have easy access to this type of information and treatment options in a timely fashion.  With the release of the Covid-19 Symptom Checker, the expected users now also include the general public.  In the future, Children’s sees significant value in providing their expert guidance directly to the public in many new and innovative ways.

The app is designed to work fully offline, but it tests for a connection on each use and automatically updates itself as needed when a connection does exist.  The app will also capture usage information to assist Children’s in analyzing the impact of the tool on decisions and outcomes and enable the Children’s team to improve the offering through this powerful platform continuously.

Admin Backend

The Admin Backend is a .NET Core application hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform. The application server provides API services to the Admin Frontend, which allows the user to add and maintain new pathways without additional development. The admin user is also able to create various beta and test versions of each pathway to enable quality assurance for each new pathway before publication.

Admin Frontend

The Admin Frontend is utilized by Children’s Hospital or any licensed client to build and manage the pathways using a web application that allows the administrator to customize the various questions, options, and recommendations to be presented to the user. This includes:

  • The top-level and sub-level clinical flows
  • Questions on each page in the flow
  • Multiple question types
  • Recommendations for treatment
  • Health system-specific branding, flows, and overrides for specific diagnostic recommendations
Children's Hospital Mobile App