Making Housecalls, 21st Century Style
Vertex has been an early leader in the virtual care space, as it has developed telemedicine solutions for multiple healthcare providers, integrating telecommunications services, patient health tracking, and subscription management into systems that combine mobile and web applications for both patients and providers, and administrative applications for system managers.
Healthcare providers wanted to reach more patients and maximize the number of patients they could see during work hours. Telemedicine – also known as virtual care and telehealth – provides doctors and other care providers with the ability to achieve this outreach and increase productivity, but several organizations that contacted Vertex wanted their patient health data managed privately, without using cloud-based solutions.
Remote doctor and wellness visits, made possible by software and internet technology, are one of the most popular and profitable new trends in Medicine. Vertex has been fortunate to be a leader in this area for the past five years, building complete, full-featured telemedicine systems for healthcare customers.
The Challenge of Private Telecommunications Hosting
One of the greatest challenges Vertex faced in our telemedicine development efforts was the need to keep the server systems private and under the control of the IT departments of its customers. Leading chat and WebRTC (video and audio conferencing over the Internet) providers are almost exclusively cloud-based, and the easiest way to deploy these systems is using cloud services.
However, Vertex was able to work with manufacturers of private systems for these telecommunication services to provide its customers with the privately managed servers they require. This helped us more easily meet this requirement when we encountered it again on the project.
Sample server/network design for a telemedicine project.
Making Complex Applications Easy to Use
Telemedicine applications may appear to be simple to their customers – developers intend for well-crafted software to appear to be deceptively simple – but they are actually complex systems involving many types of software programs and services working together cohesively.
In this case, where a suite of applications is being designed and developed by Vertex for a multispecialty
healthcare provider, numerous applications are integrated to create a seamless system combining chat,
video, audio,
in-app and system notifications, text messaging, database operations, and more. This
system allows healthcare providers to create multiple chat channels at once, upload documents, view
documents uploaded by patients,
view a patient’s medical history, initiate video or audio
conferencing, log encounters, and view/edit past encounters – all from a mobile app or web application.
Mobile provider apps for both iOS and Android, as well as responsive/adaptive web applications, were
created by Vertex for this system. Providers can simultaneously visit with as many as five
patients
with these applications.
On the other side of a medical encounter, mobile apps and a web application allow patients to register,
subscribe, manage their subscriptions, add friends and family profiles to their accounts, initiate
telemedicine encounters via chat, participate in encounters by video or audio, upload images and
documents, review images and documents with their providers, and much more.
Managing an Integrated System of Applications
In addition to the iOS and Android mobile apps and web applications for both patients and providers,
Vertex created administrative applications that managed the various systems and patient data
created
during telemedicine encounters.
The server and network infrastructure for this system – architected, installed, integrated, tested, and
deployed by Vertex – includes web servers, application servers, database servers, WebRTC servers,
chat
servers, notification servers, and text/SMS messaging services.
The eMD Access Provider app lets a single doctor chat with as many as five patients simultaneously.At any
time, a patient can request that the visit be switched
from text-based chat to voice or video chat,
which the provider can enable with the tap of a button.
A Variety of Telehealth Solutions
A different telehealth system developed by Vertex focused on urgent care clinics, providing these clinics with a means of optimizing physician hours through a response queue for managing incoming patients effectively – saving clinics thousands of dollars a day in otherwise unbilled idle time.
Other telemedicine solutions developed by Vertex include physician queueing and notification, insurance plan integration, electronic prescriptions, and pharmacy pickup scheduling. Vertex is already at work on the next generation of service offerings in telehealth fields, developing applications for nutritional management and counseling as well as automated medication dosing.
Database Design and Schema Definitions
Design Documents: Use Case Diagrams, Domain Model Diagrams, Application Wireframes
Project Documents – Gantt Charts, Schedule, Budgets
Server System Software Development – Integration and Business Automation Logic
eCommerce Development/Integration and Subscription Management
QA/Testing – QA Management, Stress and Latency Testing, Unit Testing
Network Administration, Data Center Buildout, Server Setup
Chat-Video-Audio-Messaging System (including business logic and workflow code and databases)
Design Documents: Use Case Diagrams, Domain Model Diagrams, Application Wireframes
eCommerce and Subscription Management Application