Nexus Disease Management Platform
Leveraging software to bring standards and scalability to disease management.
Encore Healthcare is a Tennessee based health management company focused on population health and complex care solutions for post acute care providers. In their many combined years working in disease management, the clinicians have developed protocols and algorithms to successfully manage risk among respiratory patients. Our challenge was to develop a digital product around those methods that improved efficiency, speed, and scalability. The result is NEXUS, a disease management platform which enables next-generation high-touch respiratory management at home. By The Way Labs was involved in all stages of product development, from initial discovery to the development of documentation and sales materials.
Approach & Collaboration
Building a Healthcare Innovation from Scratch
By The Way Labs began with initial discovery with the client, translating client’s clinical requirements into actionable agile user stories. Working from the user stories, we developed a UI prototype to allow stakeholders to see and "interact" with the project. Stakeholders were able to iterate and refine usability in the design phase (vs development), saving time and resources. We built presentations to facilitate internal communication and to serve as sales collateral to current and prospective clients.
Results
Delivering a Groundbreaking SaaS Healthcare Platform
Leveraging decoupled Drupal, we turned an idea on a whiteboard into a powerful healthcare SaaS platform, now serving more than 100,000 patients.
Tracking Patient Progress with an Intuitive Dashboard
Using a competency-based learning approach, we developed a plan of care dashboard which uses badges to clearly show a patient’s real-time progress within the program. The intuitive interface allows quick navigation throughout the program elements. The web app is optimized for use in tablets, but the responsive design also performs well in desktop and mobile devices. For rapid development, we relied on Sketch and Invision to develop fully functional mocks. Stakeholders were able to provide feedback to the demo at each stage of design, allowing for quick, iterative product development.
HIPAA-Compliant Architecture on AWS
The web application, built with headless Drupal and AngularJS, utilizes a responsive design optimized for tablets, desktops, and mobile devices. A custom Drupal back-end with a RESTFul API ensures data storage and retrieval, while dual-authentication enables seamless integration with other systems. This backend was originally built using Drupal 7 and was then successfully migrated to a new Drupal 9 site. This involved the migration of hundreds of thousands of nodes and custom entities.
The project's complex infrastructure, hosted on AWS, ensures HIPAA-compliant health data security through various tools, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, Route53 traffic policies, API gateway instances, S3 web containers, and Virtual Private Cloud protection.
Knowledgbase & Collateral
By The Way Labs integrated the NEXUS platform with a custom drupal website documentation and support. We organized and formatted over 150 clinical articles into the knowledge-base and authored technical and user documentation to support the software. We produced print versions of select documentation including a patient workbook, a therapist user guide, and sales materials.
BTW labs developed our software from the ground up. They facilitated our ideation and helped guide the product from idea to working software. During our startup phase BTW labs filled the roles of product design, project management, as well as engineering.