WithHealth: Releasing a fully operational patient MedTech portal in just 6 weeks in response to COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction

WithHealth is a pioneer MedTech company founded in San Diego, US. Thanks to cloud technology, big data, and advanced algorithms the company provides precision, proactive, personalized, and affordable care for employers and employees.

WithHealth provides concierge precision care for employees by utilizing genomics, Digital Twin/AI, care coordination, and virtual care to make health care personalized, affordable, proactive, and accessible. WithHealth has several service offerings such as its Tribal Health program, Workplace and Film Set Safety programs surrounding the COVID-19 response, and Complete Care, its concierge precision care program.

Business solution

The beginning of cooperation

The client saw an opportunity in the fact that many companies need to get employees back to work and operate safely and effectively despite the pandemic. They decided to create a patient portal that would enable WithHealth to provide this service to its customers and employees. They chose Pragmatic Coders’ healthcare software development services for this task, likely influenced by our successful collaboration on a previous project that satisfied both parties.

Discovery phase

In order to know user expectations, we conducted research. It showed us, among other things, that moving forward with a mobile-responsive website is a better idea than developing an app. With this knowledge, the roadmap could be prepared and the development process could begin. It’s worth noting that Pragmatic Coders not only takes care of the product concept, but also the product design, product development, and ongoing maintenance.

The team

Over the course of the project, the number of team members changed several times, depending on the needs of each phase. At one point it was even 12-16 people, including a Product Owner and people handling DevOps, design, or development. For this reason, the role of the Product Owner was extremely important, whose main goals at the beginning were arranging the backlog and taking care of the effective flow of domain knowledge in the growing team.

The work process

The team uses Scrum and works in two-week sprints with planning, daily meetings, and sprint reviews to provide clarity and empower communication. Slack, Jira, and Google Meet help us a lot. Moreover, the client creates user stories and reviews them, we do the refinement and assign story points. This enabled us to prioritize efficiently.
Interestingly, we’ve made it a rule that each sprint review is run by a client who goes through completed features. Thanks to this they know how everything works, and we have the opportunity to observe whether our solutions are intuitive.
All this can be summed up in the words of our customer who wrote in a review on Clutch: We may be working remotely but our communication and collaboration make us feel like we’re one team.

Major challenges

We faced several challenges while developing the product. As mentioned before, it was a big effort to control the backlog and the flow of knowledge in a growing team. Thanks to actions taken, e.g. setting priorities, estimating, and creating subteams, we managed to overcome it. Another challenge came from the fact that the requirements of portal users often changed according to the pandemic situation. They needed to be responded to quickly.

The outcome

The end goal of every product we implement is always the success of our clients. That’s why we are excited that our work has resulted in a platform that enables WithHealth to fulfill its mission – to help its customers with the workplace, production, and film set safety. At this point, they had almost a dozen successful productions with no shutdowns, which supports the industry. They’ve helped corporate clients stay open through the pandemic and keep their workforce safe. They also help one warehouse to avoid a shutdown.
There are quantifiable metrics as well to show the results of our efforts. Features implemented by us in the portal have helped reduce WithHealth’s manual work by about one FTE (full-time equivalent). This means that the client can spend more time on other tasks, such as supporting more users.