Delivering a novel ethnic-aware patient care platform with AI & data science

Did you know Somalis never go to a doctor of the opposite gender? Thousands of Somali men and women live in the US. Companies responsible for providing them with healthcare aren’t aware of that, so those thousands of people can’t access the medical services they need.

The problem isn’t limited to just Somalis. US minorities suffer from health conditions that could have been prevented if a medical care system had been adjusted to serve these communities.

Challenge

The client approached us with their large, legacy operational database containing PHI and other types of medical data. Our challenge was to build a platform that integrates and presents data to support the daily work of two internal departments. This platform would leverage both the client’s existing database and external patient data, and could be enhanced by AI models with the potential to evolve into a SaaS solution.

Solution

The results of the collaboration between our client and Pragmatic Coders are two products.

• PATIENT MANAGEMENT PLATFORM: A management system tailored for health coordinators and, crucially, nursing staff.
• DATA SOURCE: A database centered on ethnic minorities to reveal hidden social intricacies and cater to their distinct needs.

The solution concept is rooted in value-based healthcare and preventive care approaches. Our client believes that emphasizing effective outcomes over the number of procedures helps to cut costs and deliver superbly personalized care.

Patient management platform

The patient management platform empowers healthcare providers to deliver culturally competent care, enhancing the healthcare experience for all minorities in the US.

Regulation compliance

The platform helps build knowledge about the patient. To develop it, we had to overcome all legal compliance requirements and medical nuances. Eventually, we combined the clinical processes and data representation interface so that it efficiently provides a complete patient picture.

Product Owner’s role

Our Product Owner helped us keep the right direction when developers and UX designers strived to provide the most straightforward and most pragmatic solutions to all of the requirements.

Technicalities

In 15 months, we:

• Built care platform on AWS with a Kubernetes container orchestration platform using a modern JavaScript stack: Node.js, TypeScript, Next.js, React.
• Built a complex data integration pipeline that enables near real-time data synchronization for various data sources in a data source-agnostic way.
• Implemented 4 integrated platform modules, including the possibility of multi-tenant deployments.
• Handled complex RBAC scenarios involving multiple identity providers.
• Have responded to evolving business needs through an Agile development process.

Data source

The data source we created gathers information from diverse sources and provides valuable insights into cultural attributes, psychographics, and other demographic information.

Benefits for the client

Correlated with AI solutions, it significantly improved our client’s performance by letting them:

• Gain clarity on the target audience to better market and engage them.
• Discover the best channels to host marketing efforts and optimize them.
• Improve the customer/patient experience for the client’s current audience.
• Include the data from all communities and ethnicities in the machine learning process, ensuring no health disparities or discrimination from the applied AI algorithms.

Technicalities

In less than a year, we:

• Built a data lake based on AWS, S3, AWS Glue, Athena, and QuickSight.
• Built a data engineering and data science platform based on AWS – S3, Glue, Airflow, EMR Studio, all supported and managed with CI/CD GitLab.
• Created a collection of all medical facilities that were Black-owned practices (i.e. run by a Black doctor).
• Integrated the client’s sales/marketing CRM with their patient/potential patient database.
• Successfully implemented a predictive model using the data lake, data engineering, and data science platform (points 1 & 2 above) predicting which scheduled visits would be missed due to patient absence (resulting in roughly 30% fewer uncancelled, missed visits).
• Implemented good software delivery practices.

Need help with your project?

Since 2014, we’ve been a leading force in Poland’s software scene, building market-proven mobile and web apps. Our diverse portfolio spans various industries, including innovative AI-powered solutions and regulation-compliant medical apps.

We can help you build an app from scratch or improve your current project. You can start with a small team and scale it according to your needs.

Ready to discuss your idea? Hit the “Contact” button and hop on a call with our team!

Project highlights

• Product benefits: The product reduces costs for organizations, ensures legal compliance, and provides personalized care for patients from minority communities.
• Go-to team: We created a strong and collaborative relationship with the client, becoming their trusted resource for all issues, technical and non-technical (e.g., Agile implementation).
• Agile expertise: We successfully implemented best practices for Agile software delivery and Scrum methodologies within the project.