Next-gen medical charting for future-focused care

InnoCare wanted to give its clinicians an intuitive cloud-based tool that would simplify their jobs and make it easier to onboard new staff. The existing charting app just wasn’t as user-friendly as it could be. Confusing (and copious) buttons. Cumbersome links. Slow response times. Through an eight-week discovery, it became clear that this would be more than a simple lift and shift. Together with InnoCare, we dug into the legacy app and found some deeply embedded code and memory challenges that needed to be addressed. Stat.

We set out to give InnoCare the biggest business-value bang for its buck in the shortest possible time by isolating part of the legacy app, reimagining the clinician experience, and rebuilding it in the cloud. Of course, the transition from on-premises to the cloud presented challenges of its own. Keeping confidential patient information safe and secure was a priority, and Canada’s data center offerings were relatively new. This would be one of the first deployments to Microsoft Azure in Canadian data centers.

InnoCare already had a small but experienced software team, one that also saw this large-scale effort as an opportunity to level-up its own capabilities. InnoCare engineers were embedded with a Slalom Build Engagement Manager, Solution Owner, Solution Architect, UX Architect, QE leads, quality engineers, and software engineers.

And that really is the essence of Build as a Service. By bringing the right team of builders together to co-create with InnoCare’s group of experts, we’re able to implement an agile workflow and get everything up and running, fast. To help the team react quickly to unexpected challenges, we put a CI/CD pipeline in place to rapidly build, test, and deploy new code. Then, to ensure performance parity, we monitored, load tested, and generated analytics to fuel iteration. This was a true co-creation project, combining Slalom Build technical muscle with features, priorities and business-value insights from InnoCare.

Our job was to reimagine what the clinician experience could be—intuitive, simple, responsive, optimized for desktop and tablets—and help them reclaim time for better patient care. Each time we created new working prototypes, we met with clinicians to get their firsthand feedback. With their input, we were able to streamline compliance, form entry, charting, patient profile management, reporting, and check-in. The new system also features an app-based visual patient model that allows clinicians to easily log symptoms according to their location on the body, then automatically generates diagnostic codes.

With no out-of-the-box solution available to execute our approach, the team had to get creative. We chose to build the front end on Aurelia – a stable, easy-to-use technology well-suited to InnoCare—with Java Spring Boot for the back end, and MySQL for the data store.

In the end we introduced Charting+, fast, responsive, future-facing software. And it’s already allowing InnoCare to operate at a fraction of its previous costs. Now, the company can confidently onboard more customers on a completely stable platform and use its new competitive edge to grow business. Clinics have seen a reduction in attrition of front-office staff—a significant savings in itself—because their teams are able to do their jobs more efficiently and without outages.

For the first time ever, the company is able to pull and aggregate data from its charting software into meaningful information for its sales force. Its engineers learned a better way to build software and now have full ownership of the platform. And, most importantly, InnoCare can now provide patients with a uniquely personal, tailor-made experience—because clinicians are back to doing the job they love. Caring for patients.