Software Engineering helped a leading global provider of professional information and healthcare services with a Clinical Decision Support System
Key Business Outcomes
Revolutionized Point-of-Care support to healthcare professionals by 100%
Improved Patient Outcomes by 95%
Quick Access to Information for Primary Care Physicians
About the Customer
Customer is a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services for healthcare, tax and accounting, governance, risk and compliance, legal and regulatory, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) sectors. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 21,400 people worldwide.
Business Challenge
With over 20 years of knowledge base of best-selling clinical content in the family medicine market, the customer felt a need for an integrated solution that would help as a guide for primary care professionals and clinical students in their daily clinical decision support. The customer required an application to provide integrated clinical decision support for its primary care professionals and clinical students, ensuring quick access to essential information at the point of care to ease patient care decisions and improve patient outcomes.
Solution Highlights – PHP and Drupal Implementation
After a thorough analysis of the customer requirements, our core PHP and Drupal teams were involved in developing a fully integrated clinical decision support application. Our teams leveraged latest tools and technologies and adopted industry’s best practices to develop the application to provide real-time guidance to physicians and clinical students, for improving patient care outcomes.
Project Activities
- Requirements gathering: Checklists and templates were used to gather requirements keeping in mind the customer needs and objectives.
- Application design and development: For front-end development the technologies used were PHP, Drupal, HTML5, CSS, and Angular JS/Bootstrap.
- Custom module development: Various extensions and custom modules were developed to add specific features and functionalities to the application tailored to the needs of clinical physicians.
- Theming and responsive design: In order to deliver a consistent and user-friendly experience across devices, Drupal theming and responsive design were used.
- Quality assurance (QA): Various QA testing methods included functional, regression, and performance testing methods to verify and validate the reliability and performance of the solution.
Technology Stack
NGINX was used as the web server and MySQL served as the database backend for storing and managing clinical content and user data. Drupal CMS was used for theming and responsive design. Tools such as Selenium, nUnit, Git, SonarQube, and Jenkins were used for automated testing, version control, continuous integration, code quality, and deployment.
Key Features Developed
Search bar on all pages: A search bar was displayed on every page for users to easily search for an intended topic. In the search results page, the user could search for the intended topic thereby enabling quick navigation to the required topic.
Share content via email: With the topic-sharing feature developed, the logged users could share the topic content available under multiple categories via email to other users having valid email IDs.
Bookmarking and favorites: Users can bookmark their favorite topics and content on the application to view later with this feature.
Sort content as per search need: Users will be able to sort the search content based on factors such as relevance, most recent updates, A to Z Alphabetical, and Z to A Reverse Alphabetical orders, thus making the app more interactive to the user.
Browse and filter content: Users can filter the search content based on the available categories such as diseases, conditions, lab tests, PT exercises, algorithm charts, etc., and also show all content types based on the user’s need.
Sort the disease based on specialty: The specialty listing feature gives the user an advantage to go through the desired specialty and also helps to sort specific diseases belonging to one specialty when the user intends to do so.
Business Outcome
Enhanced Point-of-Care support for physicians: The app provided quick access to clinical content and decision support tools, enabling healthcare professionals, physicians, and clinical students to make informed decisions at point-of-care support by 100%, easing patient care.
Delivered optimal user experience: Drupal theming and responsive design ensured optimal user experience across devices, enhancing accessibility and usability.
Improved performance of clinicians: With effective features in place and easy access to clinical decision making at the point-of-care, improved the performance of physicians and clinical students.
Improved patient outcomes: The workflow efficiency of clinicians improved significantly with a quick decision support system and improved patient care outcomes by 95%.
