An EHR-Integrated Telehealth Patient Portal Attracting Up to 10 New Patients Daily

Summary

INNERLUXES planned and developed a patient portal with telemedicine functionality for a US-based healthcare provider. Three months after the launch, the EHR-integrated solution had attracted over 1,500 patients.

About the Client

The Client is a rapidly growing US business running several medical practices. It provides primary, urgent, and family care services in New York.

To stand out among competitors, the Client needed to digitize the patient journey and make it easier and more engaging. The Client wanted a web and mobile patient portal to help patients schedule their appointments, join online consultations with doctors, and securely access their health records.

The medical staff uses the athenahealth EHR in their work, so the Client wanted the new patient-centered solution to integrate smoothly into the existing software ecosystem. A user-friendly design was also a priority.

Project Planning and Development

To improve the quality and accessibility of its medical services with a convenient patient solution, the Client needed an experienced technology partner. The Client turned to INNERLUXES to design and build custom patient software.

After the initial discovery stage (10 days), INNERLUXES drafted the software concept and assembled a team experienced in the healthcare domain. It comprised a project manager, a business analyst, a UX designer, a UI designer, and a senior DevOps engineer. To build and test the software, INNERLUXES provided senior back-end, front-end, and mobile developers, and senior QA engineers.

INNERLUXES's business analyst interviewed the key stakeholders to gain a thorough understanding of the Client's needs and used this information to outline the solution functionality and create a software specification. The project team helped ensure compliance with HIPAA and establish reliable, secure medical data exchange with the athenahealth EHR.

INNERLUXES suggested starting with an MVP so the Client could get a fully functional patient solution fast, then upgrade it after gathering patient and doctor feedback. Using the Scrum approach, the project team delivered the software functionality in two-week iterations and held regular demonstrations to keep the Client updated on project status and any emerging challenges.

Solution Design and EHR Integration

The solution delivered by INNERLUXES comprises:

• A web patient portal and a cross-platform mobile patient portal with identical functionality, to cater to all groups of patients: those who prefer mobile devices and those who use desktops.
• A simple admin panel to tune the web and mobile portal settings, manage user-facing content, and more.

The HIPAA-compliant solution intentionally has no separate doctor interface, because the Client wanted to reduce the need for additional user training. A doctor can access all patient-generated information and join a telehealth session directly from the integrated athenahealth EHR. The athenahealth platform also serves as the storage for patient records and appointment data, so information stays consistent across the EHR, the web portal, and the mobile portal.

INNERLUXES used RESTful APIs to integrate the patient solution with the athenahealth EHR. To help the Client reduce spend on athenahealth API requests, INNERLUXES's team optimized the number of requests and implemented patient data caching.

Patient-Centered and Telehealth Functionality

• Online appointment scheduling, rescheduling, and cancellation.
• Notifications to patients about upcoming appointments.
• Patient questionnaires, treatment consent, and data-processing consent collection. Patient identity is validated using an e-signature collected after the first patient check-in. All consents and questionnaires are stored in the EHR.
• Built-in video conferencing and messaging between patients and physicians, using the ready-made athenaTelehealth service for smooth physician access via the EHR.
• Secure patient access to their data, medication and treatment plans, appointment summaries, and more.
• In-app billing and payments for medical services, via credit or debit card.
• An offline check-in kiosk in one of the Client's facilities. The kiosk software lets patients use a public tablet to scan their patient ID barcode to notify the medical staff that they have arrived for an in-person appointment.

Key Value for the Client

• 4 weeks from project start to a comprehensive software design.
• 8 months to implement the full-fledged solution.
• 1,500+ patients using the portal within three months of launch.
• 3–10 new patients start using the portal daily.
• Automated appointment scheduling helps handle the patient flow in the growing hospital network.

Technologies and Tools

React Native, React.js, TypeScript, Node.js.

AWS cloud services: Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, AWS Amplify, Amazon Cognito, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppSync, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch.