Time Magazine’s list of Best Medical Inventions of 2002 includes breath strips from Pfizer and the birth control patch. Noteworthy innovations to be sure, but perhaps more illuminating as examples for how quickly and significantly health technology has evolved over the past 20 years.
Since then, health technology as a broad category has been responsible for new vaccine technology, popularized robotic surgery, and introduced wearable devices for health and fitness. We seem to be constantly uncovering new ways to eradicate disease, soothe pain and improve our day-to-day health.
No matter the innovation, Chariot Solutions has consistently been at the fore over these past two decades, helping health and medical technology companies deliver on the promise of futuristic care. In looking back over that span, our work has helped to power three massive changes in the healthtech arena.
Digital Health
The advent of the internet and smartphones opened the door to digital health innovations, but the remote nature of care during the pandemic accelerated their adoption. Patients can now speak with a doctor, access their medical records, or even use an app to learn how to administer first aid – all using just the phone in their pocket.
That shift has required an incredible lift in terms of digitization, data integration, UI development and more. From hospital systems to startups to mobile app development for well-known brands like Tylenol, we’ve been critical partners in the evolution of this trend.
Celerity is a national electronic medical records (EMRs) software provider, offering a powerful, intuitive EMR system for health systems and physicians. Celerity tapped Chariot to build a new custom EMR for patients with addiction, behavioral and mental health issues.
We designed and built a patient-facing portal featuring self-service patient sign-up functionality for their partner healthcare providers. Each provider was able to use the portal to sign up new patients, complete onboarding documents, schedule appointments and send messages.
Our experience in digitization across industries, data pipeline experience and our UI chops all came into play as we built a portal that could communicate seamlessly with Celerity’s internal systems, notably its CAM EMR, which handles overall requests to create new patient profiles, appointments and track system-level activity.
An efficient build in a short time frame: In just six weeks, the Chariot team designed, built, tested, and launched a custom EMR solution for patients with addiction, behavioral and mental health issues. Since this project took place during the pandemic, we worked remotely, and in close communication with the Celerity team and stakeholders.
Wearable and Remote Devices
The explosion in wearables and devices – from the Apple Watch to wifi-enabled blood pressure monitor – has amplified the power of the digital health revolution. These devices allow patients to take control over their own health to a remarkable degree, unshackling them from a health clinic yet keeping them connected to their healthcare provider in a meaningful way.
Leveraging our experience in the Internet of Things (IoT) and our deep understanding of the interplay between software and hardware, Chariot has served as a trusted development partner to companies like RTM and CareCam.
For RTM, we helped ensure their wearable respiratory monitor could transmit vital patient information to the cloud and then populate a dashboard for monitoring. For CareCam’s health tracker, our engineering teams optimized the device’s performance and battery life while our designers rebuilt the user interface, ensuring Blue Cross members could track their daily activities easily and with confidence.
Data Integration
As the digital health and remote device sectors have exploded, so too has the resulting amount of patient data. Throughout, Chariot has been front and center helping build data pipelines for our partners, finding ways to capture the most valuable data, transmit it to data warehouses and configure it for tracking and monitoring.
For Health Verity, an identity, privacy, and governance exchange, we made it possible for their teams to pull healthcare and patient data from multiple clients and vendors, scrub it for personally identifiable information, clean and correlate it, and then provide it back to their customers for analysis.
We also worked with Blackfynn, a group funded primarily by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, to aid data collection and analysis as part of its research into neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. As a development partner, we built functionality on Amazon Web Services so that all their research partners could aggregate and share information through a central platform.
One of our bigger projects was to help IQVIA in their work processing and analyzing large volumes of pharmaceutical sales in order to provide custom data and forecasting reports for large drug manufacturers. Before Chariot, every time the company needed to produce a new client deliverable, they had to spin up their engineering teams to modify legacy software and mainframes to build out a new solution. Not only did this add time and cost to every client deliverable, but it also became an enormous maintenance burden.
Chariot embarked on a multi-year effort to architect, design, and implement a best-of-breed big data platform that allows IQVIA users to define reusable rules for processing and analyzing data, then build custom pipelines from these rules. This new approach provides a user interface for defining these rules and pipelines, and an execution platform that automatically translates these rules into Apache Spark jobs for processing.
Over the course of this journey, Chariot worked with various business teams at IQVIA to ensure the platform met their diverse needs. Now, for the first time, the company has a modern, shared platform that can be used by the entire organization, greatly reducing overall implementation time, costs and maintenance requirements.
The Future of HealthTech Innovation
Chariot’s deep bench of engineering talent and our commitment to produce technology solutions that can deliver on real-world business goals has kept us at the forefront of healthtech. Whether for digital, data or devices – or all three – we understand macro trends in healthcare like the coming era of value-based care and how it relates to technology development, budgeting and utility.
Looking ahead, it is these skills in application that will allow us to influence the next 20 years of health technology innovation on behalf of the health systems, innovators and entrepreneurs redefining the future of patient care.