CASE STUDY

An Intelligent Innovation to Assist Emergency Medical Staff

Industry

Healthcare

Work Done

Mobile App Development, MVP Development, Web Application Development,

Challenge

As we all know, taking an ambulance in the US is not only a costly affair, but the tedious documentation process creates a critical hindrance as well. The client wanted to address this concern and create a product to make the documentation process digital.

By rule, a nurse shall always accompany the patient during ambulance transits and most probably s/he manages the documentation process. Also, there are many layers involved. The nurse and the billing admin from the ambulance service company, and the Insurance company that reimburses the expenses.

The client came up with specific requirements to create an app that facilitates easy capturing of document image so that OCR can be done on scanned image to extract data and pre-populate on a standard form for the billing admin to review.

There were many challenges as well. Not only we had to adhere to the HIPAA compliance, but also make sure the hand-written or typed documents are scanned and the information is extracted in relevant forms at the other end.

The initial requirement was for an app for Getac windows tablet but later it was extended to Android and iPad. As we follow agile practices for all of our MVP development works, we started with planning sprints for the entire project.

The solution

Minimalistic, User-friendly design

The situation must be already tense when a nurse starts preparing for the transit. Our designers came up with a self-explanatory user interface that even caters to a few not-so-tech-friendly emergency staff. Since we’re negating out each and every phase of a physical contact, we made sure the navigation for documentation upload, query redressal, and real-time chats are smooth. The mobile app was to be used by a nurse accompanying the patient while the backend access was to be given to the billing admin of the ambulance service company to decide on Insurance claims.

Easing the Documentation Process

The medical staff is required to complete an Emergency Facesheet for each patient and it needs to be provided to the billing admin of the ambulance company for every ride. This app intends to negate the time-consuming exercise of filing both the Facesheet and Physician Certification statement to the billing admins physically and make it digital. The app allows the nurse to take photographs of the document, edit it (make it clear for scanning) and upload it for the billing admin to takeover the rest of the work.

Optical Character Recognition and HIPAA compliance

After the nurse uploads the document and sends it to the billing admin, the scanned copy should be able to extract all relevant data to any type of Facesheet used by respective hospitals. Easier said than done, we used AWS for this Optical Character Recognition process. It was quite a challenge for the engineers, but the team did exceptionally well and reached 90-100% accuracy in reading and extracting the OCR data.

To encounter any possible data leak and to manage the security and privacy of PHI (personal health information), we have adhered to the physical, administrative, and technical safeguards outlined in HIPAA.

Billing Admin Manager, Real-time chat, Raise an issue before approval

We also worked on many in-app features to enhance the overall process. A few of them includes getting an in-app notification for all approved/rejected requests from the admin department. A nurse can raise a review request for every rejected document and can discuss the issues through an in-app chat box

Also, we created a Billing Manager access to manage multiple billing admin accounts. These managers can see statistics regarding approvals/issues raised, access gaps in entire process and can process requests received from nurse as well.