The Stack Choice

Less than three months was the aggressive deadline for completion of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) required to meet the needs of the frontline medical staff. Given the firm deadline, the small team of two senior-level highly experienced software engineers and a UI/UX designer set about carefully outlining the key stories to be collaboratively developed. The backend engineer designed and developed the cost-effective and scalable architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The MongoDB Atlas managed service offering was selected as the main store of persistent data primarily because of its operational flexibility and adaptability to change with minimal overhead of essential maintenance.

Microservice was chosen as the architectural pattern to facilitate the business functions and team expansion in the foreseeable future. User engagement with the application was another key focus for the CTO. For a smooth experience, the React Frontend engineer along with the UI/UX designer seamlessly incorporated user research data and constructive feedback to realistically achieve the desired goal.

The Pilot MVP Launch

Very often ambitious projects have invariably failed in their mission because of a lack of transparent process and proper alignment between business and technical development requirements. We sought a balance using modern software management best practices in the form of Agile Scrum to enable the Team to efficiently deliver the pilot project in less than three months and on time for the launch.

Continuous feedback from patients and especially the clinicians whom the product was mainly targeted at was crucial. Given the intensity of the environment and the patients who were predominantly refugees, there was marked improvement when using the application over the paper-based form. The noted metrics were:

• Improvement in accountability - Audit logs of interaction between patient and clinician.
• Time to process patient registration and identity verification.
• Accurate record keeping and tracking of incidence of diseases.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

After a few months of usage on the medical frontline in Lebanon-Syrian border, there is now reliable data and points accumulated to produce customised reports. High-ranking Government agencies whose interest it is to make critical decisions based on accurate reports to properly allocate necessary resources to support medics on the frontline now have the tools to achieve their goals. We are directly entering the Big Data phase of the application’s organic evolution as a result. Soon afterwards, the considerable success of the pilot was rolled over to Kenya. There are now broader ambitions for customised reporting from the once difficult to operate remote regions.

The CraftTurf Team extended the already scalable system to incorporate Apache Kafka as a messaging platform which is then pipelined into a Data lake. The valuable addition of Mongo stitch, BigQuery, Python language, and a Data Scientist enabled the successful completion of the highly customised predictable reporting engine.

Scale-Up

Following another round of successful funding for Elephant Healthcare and growing list of feature requests from their clients; including a billing and medical services stock management system, the stage is now set for an expansion of their growing London Team. We proactively worked with them in the recruitment and onboarding process to ensure the most suitable engineering candidates once employed can quickly settle into the Team. This we consider as a notable achievement on our organizational commitment in the handover process of a successful project.

If you would like to get in touch with us to find out how we can work together in achieving your technical goals, then please contact us.

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