First, we listened to the client's wishes and requirements and decided to conduct the Design and Discovery Phase. The reasoning is pretty simple, as the client had core business goals and a concrete development plan, the marketing part was missing. Branding, app UI/UX design concept, and the very first prototype. All of this had to be done explicitly before launching the main MVP phase. Reason? To avoid any unexpected milestones and move in the right development direction that the client had a concept.
As our team passed this phase and all of the uncertainties were cleared out, it was time to launch the MVP. The first thing that was put on the line is the integration of Athena EMR with its core backend. It provided the app with a dynamic and automated scheduling system. The core aspects that this app allowed the typical user to do were: to book various appointments by their type before clinic opening hours, collect all confidential patient information, and cancel the reservations with fees charged.
After we implemented the core list of functionalities, we started to focus on the administrative panel. Although this part of any platform or app may seem relatively easy to implement, we have approached it with carefulness in our case. Some of the core things that our team has implemented were appointment scheduling management, waitlist management, user management, and CMS for appointment types, descriptions, and scheduling information.
During the active development process of both the Athena EMR integration and the administrative platform, our team was also concerned about the HIPAA with PHI. We have set limited access and controls for the hospital facility members to restrict any potential leaks to sensitive information. To further regulate the patient's data access, we also added additional restrictions for transferring, removing, or re-using any electronic PHI. Finally, we implemented some policies for utilizing the workstations where the application is going to be used.
As with any other application targeted on a large market of some specific field, it requires a chat support functionality. However, apart from any typical app with a support team, this one is different. As per HIPAA policy, the security administrator must oversee the support chat, managing the sensitive information data flow. Next, we implemented HIPAA compliant document uploading, sending processes with the storage system. And, without a doubt, we have also added the task management and the team tagging. This was done to simplify transferring documents between different groups of people who will assist their inquiries.