A national electronic medical records software provider needed to create a self-service sign-up function for patients. This particular EMR software is designed for patients who are living with addiction, behavioral and mental health issues. The powerful application is used in some of the nation’s leading treatment agencies to improve efficiency and outcomes. The company engaged Chariot to develop a customer portal and interface with its flagship EMR product.
Challenge: Streamline The Patient Experience
The provider wanted patients to be able to sign up, review and complete onboarding documents, send messages, get relevant content, and schedule appointments online.
Other goals of the project were to provide a low-cost application architecture that could scale to accommodate many simultaneous users, create different access levels based on role, and automate user creation. The provider also wanted to send emails for common tasks like sign-up, password changes, sending PDFs and delivering meeting notifications.
Solution: Fully Remote, Fully Engaged
First, Chariot’s User Experience team created wireframes and high fidelity designs that became the basis upon which the web-based portal was built. The development team included a tech lead/project manager, several software developers, and an infrastructure support specialist. Chariot’s CTO stepped in to provide overall architectural support and development for some AWS services.
Chariot took a lean agile approach to the project, working alongside the client in two-week sprints and providing frequent demos of the application in progress. The developers used a Docker-based stack and leveraged several AWS services. Chariot’s infrastructure specialist built up AWS software stacks to host the application online.
Result: Efficient Build in a Short Time Frame
After just six weeks, the team was able to stand up the application on AWS completely, and during the development phase, a full AWS software stack was deployed to the customer to begin its own testing to verify integration.
The team provided an initial testing endpoint on Chariot’s AWS account, eventually deploying a full stack for the client on its own AWS account. The team developed a platform support guide and delivered the stack via AWS CloudFormation.
Because this effort took place during the pandemic, the project was developed remotely. The team used JIRA for sprint planning and management, and GitHub for version control and project management. Documentation was written using Markdown and ASCIIDoctor and committed to the source code branch so it could be tracked in version control.