Client

The company is a provider of software solutions to hospitals, healthcare practices, pharmacies, etc. Based in the UK, the organization strives to facilitate access to healthcare services, boost efficiency, and improve patient satisfaction.

Background

Traditionally, patients had to call the hospital to arrange an appointment with a healthcare professional. However, they had to wait until an assigned specialist checked doctors’ working schedules and found the time suitable for both sides.
In the context of unexpected events such as a clinician’s illness, employees had to manually reorganize schedules and notify patients, which was time-consuming and inconvenient. Additionally, people often had to travel a few hours from home to a clinic even in minor cases such as prescriptions of medicines.
This situation aggravated with the spread of COVID-19. As hospitals were not able to hold in-person visits with patients to prevent risks of infection, they needed to offer online consultations where possible.
As a result, the customer recognized the opportunity of building a marketplace platform to connect medical providers with patients to boost efficiency and deliver remote care. Since the client lacked in-house expertise in marketplace development, it partnered with Arateg.

Project goal

Cooperating with Arateg, the company wanted to create a healthcare marketplace website that would bring together caregivers and patients while enabling online appointment scheduling and consultations. The main aim of the client was to help medical organizations and professionals automate manual processes and increase productivity.

Project duration

6 months

Team

4 frontend developers, 4 backend developers, 2 UI/UX designers, 2 quality assurance engineers, 2 React Native developers, a project manager.

Technologies

Python, TypeScript, Django, Django REST Framework, AWS, Elasticsearch, Firebase, Docker, Twilio, React, Redux, Redux-Saga, Storybook, SVG, styled-components, RabbitMQ, Redis, Memcached, PostgreSQL, React Native.

Solution

Our software experts embarked on the project by collecting and analyzing the company’s requirements. After obtaining a clear understanding of its business-specific needs, we recommended the customer to make an online healthcare marketplace that contained two modules: the first one for doctors and the second one for patients.
By following the Agile software development approach, our engineers were able to deliver new functionality every 2-3 weeks.
As a result, the client had the possibility to validate the outcome of each stage and make suggestions while our team implemented the necessary changes on the go according to provided feedback. Thanks to this, we faster delivered a marketplace platform that aligned with expectations.

During the project, our team solved the following challenges:

  1. Since a marketplace website operated with highly sensitive data (e.g., clinical records, personal contacts, health insurance cards), it was essential to ensure proper security of information.
    To safeguard sensitive data, our engineers delivered role-based permissions, two-factor authentication, and data encryption.
    With role-based access control, we made it possible to track what changes were introduced by whom. By incorporating this feature, our team also prevented patients from making unnecessary changes to health data that might be vital to the right diagnosis.
  2. Doctors and patients had to be provided with the possibility to communicate in any convenient way.
    Employing Firebase, our developers implemented group and private chats. We used this technology as it offers various features out of the box, for instance, data synchronization in milliseconds and storage for media assets.
    In order to provide audio and video consultations, our software experts integrated an online healthcare marketplace with Twilio, a cloud communication platform as a service.
  3. To allow patients to quickly find the required specialist without time-consuming consultations or research, doctor search by symptoms had to be enabled.
    By using Elasticsearch, our team enabled full-text search by keywords. Due to this tool, the system recognizes words even if some mistakes are made. With this functionality, an online healthcare marketplace tailors clinicians (dentists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, physicians, etc.) according to indicated symptoms in milliseconds.
    In addition, our developers made it possible to save cases with unclear symptoms in the admin panel for further investigation by healthcare professionals.
  4. It was essential to prevent contradictions in doctors’ schedules in case of unexpected events such as sick leaves.
    We set up monitoring of schedule changes to prevent any contradictions. With incorporated bots, the product automatically sends patients email notifications about appointment changes while offering the possibility to choose an alternative time slot or/and doctor.
  5. As a healthcare marketplace website had to maintain a growing number of users, it was important to achieve high availability and scalability.
    Our software engineers built comprehensive features — e.g., chat, doctor search by symptoms, reporting — as a set of microservices. Thanks to microservices-based architecture, the platform can elastically scale and withstand heavy loads.
  6. Users had to be provided with a number of payment methods.
    By integrating the PayPal payment gateway, we enabled payments with cards such as Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, and American Express. To implement this functionality, our developers made various customizations when creating a healthcare marketplace website.
    For instance, when users receive an error message “Not enough money”, they should be redirected to another page and asked to choose another payment method. Our software experts had to take into account all scenarios of this kind (“a card is blocked”, “refund”, etc.), designing and building the platform accordingly.

Features

We developed an online healthcare marketplace that consists of a module for doctors and a module for patients.

A module for doctors includes the following functionality:

  1. Registration and authorization
  2. Doctor profile
  3. Schedule management
  4. Reporting
  5. An administration panel
  6. User dashboard
  7. Billing management
  8. Data sharing and management
  9. Private and group chats
  10. Video and audio communication
  11. Role-based data access control
  12. Two-factor authentication and data encryption
  13. Doctor verification

A module for patients contains features such as:

  1. User registration and authorization
  2. Doctor search by multiple filters
  3. Reviews and ratings
  4. Doctor tailoring by symptoms
  5. Appointment scheduling
  6. Private and group chats
  7. Video and audio communication
  8. Data sharing
  9. Online payments via PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Union Pay with support of 3-D Secure
  10. Geolocation
  11. Two-factor authentication and data encryption

Result

Collaborating with Arateg, the company created a healthcare marketplace platform consisting of modules for doctors and patients. Thanks to the solution, users can easily find clinicians according to their symptoms and receive online consultations.
With a marketplace website, caregivers were able to automate manual processes of appointment scheduling and management. By developing a microservices-based architecture, the customer ensured that the system can handle heavy loads and elastically scale to maintain a growing number of users.

What our client says

client review, from CTO at the UK software providing company
CTO, UK software provider

Since the first day of our collaboration, Arateg showed itself as a team of true professionals, from meeting deadlines to delivering quality code. As the CTO, I would like to note that Arateg focuses on platform scalability, high availability, and security, vital to ensuring a seamless and safe user experience.

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