Medical Equipment eCommerce App
Itransition helps a medical device company provide medical practitioners with an online dashboard tool to buy credits for their web interfacing laser devices and assess to usage statistics.
Problem
Сustomer
The Customer is a medical device leasing company based in Nashville, TN. Occupying a highend niche of a very competitive global medical device market, the company works towards making their technology available to all practitioners who desire to incorporate it into their practices.
Objective
Traditionally, practitioners could lease the upper-range priced laser therapy technology in cash or through financed purchases from third party lenders or distributors, which created a rather tight lending environment. Thus, hundreds of potential customers were turned away every year because their credit history could not meet more stringent financial underwriting standards even though on the present balance sheets they were thriving and viable.
Business Goals
The Customer pursued to develop a technology-enabled program to serve the segment of the market practitioners who delivered treatments to their patients on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Project Scope
The idea was to allow practitioners to purchase treatment credits through an online dashboard or on the device itself. Moreover, our Customer wanted to provide its clients with a training, marketing and support site to provide information aid to its customers.
On the technology side, this meant the following scope of work for Itransition:
- development of a rich-functionality web app (user dashboard + admin panel) integrated securely with a payment system;
- development of a web portal integrated with the primary web app;
- development of a web API interfacing with the JSON/XML device software.
Solution
Functionality
The solution allows for the following user roles:
Medical practitioners (target users of the program) create user accounts to:
- activate and manage medical devices;
- buy credits for treatments (online or right from the device with further device synchronization with the web app);
- track device usage statistics (number of treatments, month by month comparison, revenue estimation, etc.);
- visit the information portal to download useful information or discuss issues on the forum.
The Customer’s staff behind the admin panel in charge of managing users and devices:
- activate/block users and devices;
- assign statuses to devices (sold/leased, with/without commission, etc.)
- assign free treatments to users;
- generate reports on device usage and distributor commissions for the specified time intervals;
- edit the contents of the web portal, email templates, treatments prices, etc.;
- view device logs.
The day-to-day program management team is extremely happy with the tools that they have got at their disposal, and the only feedback our Customer has received from their clients so far is pretty positive.
Itransition’s project team not only did a great job handling the tasks they were presented with, but also would go far and beyond to make recommendations if they felt something may have worked better and may have been in the Customer’s best interests to implement. Thus, addition of automated messaging and automated internal notifications proposed by the Itransition team has greatly enhanced the Customer's ability to help their clients in the program succeed.
Process
Itransition delivered the project in 3 phases:
- phase one included delivery of a basic admin dashboard and development of a web API according to essentially specified requirements provided by the Customer;
- phase two was developing a custom training, marketing and support portal for users to assist them with the implementation of our technology into their healthcare services delivery model;
- phase three included optimization of the admin dashboard to keep track of devices, users and program performance, enhance automated program communication with users and quickly monitor any aspect of the program in an instant.
Technology Overview
The Ruby-on-Rails platform (namely, Refinery CMS) and MVC system architecture pattern were selected for the project delivery, with MySQL as a database technology. When building the admin panel, Itransition utilized Active Admin.
On the frontend, Itransition’s developers used Slim and JavaScript/CoffeeScript, with Highcharts utilized to deliver interactive charts for the web pages.
The web API solution was developed using Grape according to a detailed specification provided by the Customer. To enable practitioners to buy credits right from their devices, the solution was integrated with Paytrace payment system
Team
Itransition worked as a natural extension to the Customer’s in-house team responsible for development of the device software and providing documentation on the web APIs. Itransition’s team did the “heavy lifting” development and integration part, along with writing specification and creating interactive wireframes for the web application.
The project was delivered in phases, yet the project team incorporated scrum/sprint methodologies and worked on small pieces of the larger project toward a common end goal, proactively tackling the slightest scope creep issues.
QA and Testing
Itransition’s independent testing and QA team was involved to deliver several rounds of manual testing incorporating full acceptance testing, defects validation and regression testing.
Maintenance and Support
Currently the project continues to evolve on the maintenance and support stage. Itransition makes enhancements to the solution as the Customer moves further into the program and discovers new requirements.