Health Connective

All web applications are essentially serving the same underlying functions: capturing data and/or presenting data. The success of a project, however, lies in the nuances—how well the application solves the unique problems of each client organization. Skilled developers can predict the future, understanding how users will interact with the application and building in functionality clients may not even realize they need.

The Field-Based Program Tracking System solved dozens of workflow problems for a leading medical technology company’s robotics division sales representatives by digitizing a particularly arduous, paper-based manual process.

It’s a complete solution for managing all the tasks and data associated with field events, such as demonstrations, presentations and training sessions. 

Initially conceived as an online method for collecting registration information, the tracking system surpassed expectations and evolved to deliver not only intuitive admin interfaces but also sophisticated search capabilities and advanced reporting. Here’s a short list of what it can do:

• Track speakers: When planning field events, reps can search for appropriate speakers by availability, expertise, credentials, and more. Where it used to take weeks to match speakers to events, reps can now pull a reliable list in a matter of seconds.
• Track status: Sales managers can see at a glance every event’s current stage of development. They can quickly identify issues—a missing approval, for example, or a conflict with a proposed date—to remove barriers for the team.
• Facilitate advanced reporting: Robust search and export capabilities assist the Stryker team with both external and internal reporting. Reps no longer have to sift through paper registrations to complete required government reporting on attendees and certifications. Flexible search criteria make it exceedingly easy for reps to pull metrics for internal review, assessing event performance and making improvements for the future.
• Manage fluid attendee lists: The system isn’t a static database of names. This smart system manages waiting lists, auto-populates to fill open spots, and automatically notifies attendees of status updates and event changes.
• Accommodate disparate events: Behind the scenes, the tracking system is tasked with collecting vastly different types of data depending upon whether the event is a training session, a demonstration, etc. The back-end complexity, however, is invisible to sales reps who can jump in and out of any event type from the same streamlined interface.

The tracking system quickly became the cornerstone of the sales team’s event strategy, and its versatility reflects a close collaboration between developer and client. The Health Connective’s agile-style development process enabled the client’s team to shape the project and expand its functionality. Excitement steadily grew as they continued to discover what the platform had the potential to do.

We built the P3 Dashboard to make account management easier for our own clients. As managers of busy medical practices, our P3 clients were juggling numerous administrative tasks. Anticipating their needs, we built an intuitive dashboard that streamlined their work with our team. The interface is clean, guiding users through processes every step of the way.

Here’s what they can do now without calling customer support:

• Billing and Payments: Clients can view detailed invoices and billing history, manage credit cards, and set online payments. The system even notifies clients when credit cards expire, automatically redirecting them to the update page.
• Email Management: Clients who use our email hosting service can manage their email accounts right from the dashboard. Admins can activate and deactivate email accounts, view account activity, and even increase or decrease their storage capacity.
• User Access: The dashboard supports granular control over users and access, so practices can have multiple users with access to different features and tools. One user can also be associated with more than one practice dashboard—an important feature that’s specific to healthcare.

Dashboard admins don’t need training or an extensive FAQ document to get started, either. Our developers focused sharply on user experience, removing potential frustration points and ensuring the interface made navigation exceptionally clear. 

Future expansions of the dashboard will take advantage of API integration to bring in data from other platforms. We can link up with our reputation marketing partner, for example, to enable instant display of program metrics and analytics. 

For now, our practice managers appreciate the autonomy and account transparency the dashboard provides. It’s also gratifying to see first hand how our applications make day-to-day life easier for our clients.

The majority of the work we do for healthcare clients leverages expertise we’ve already mastered.
Still, we can count on every project to offer a unique problem to solve—and that’s often the exciting part for our developers.

Digital signature collection was the critical challenge for the surgical device certification project. Built for the sales team in charge of a robotic-arm assisted surgical device, the initial goal was to create a centralized online location to house the copious documentation required for the physician training and certification program. 

The new system would give sales reps an efficient way to:

• Access training materials from any location 
• Upload physician information, in planned groups or individually on the fly·
• Track the training and approval stages necessary for a physician to become certified to use the surgical device

It quickly became evident, however, that project success would depend upon the ability to capture and store digital physician signatures at each training site. This highly regulated training process required signatures, and the program could not be considered fully digitized if the signature piece remained paper-dependent. 

The Health Connective development team researched the optimal JQuery plug-in to use for signature capture. They arrived at a touch-friendly tool that fully supported the use of mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

The client team collaborated closely with our developers and designers to ensure the interface aligned closely with the company’s corporate branding. This not only delivered a consistent user experience for sales reps, but it also set up the potential for the client company to roll out the certification tool to other product teams.

In the end, the client marveled at how simple the development process was on their end.

Users of the internal resources website would never guess how much complex information architecture went into organizing its structure.

The website is elegant and user friendly, whether an employee is downloading files on the front end or an admin is uploading files on the back.

Making the process appear effortless was painstaking but rewarding work for the Health Connective development team. The client’s goal was to build an online hub where employees could access files for internal marketing and training initiatives. The development challenge: The files would need to be housed in various locations throughout the site, creating a complex web of interdependency. Each file would have numerous potential output areas, so the website required an intuitive system to assign files to correct locations—one that was not too onerous for site admins.

Our team carefully planned out and built a positioning framework to support the files, which included a mix of Word documents, PDFs, and images. The site’s usability was also enhanced by its high degree of responsiveness. Our developers used SVG and other tools to ensure files rotated and rendered flawlessly on desktop, tablet, and mobile—important functionality that allowed users full access to the site both in the office and out in the field. The project exceeded expectations here with clickable images, seamless transitions between formats, and streamlined navigation.

We focused on optimizing the features the client team really needed—and eliminating those that would have added unnecessary complexity. The client initially requested a full CMS to manage the design of the website, for example. However, when close consultation revealed that granular file management was the more accurate goal, that became the focus.

The result was a living, scalable website with an easy interface that belied the complex hierarchy beneath.

Purchasing medical devices is not like buying a book from Barnes & Noble. On the surface, all online catalogs appear to leverage the same technology. At the core, however, they are solving very different problems. 

Complex product interdependence was the defining challenge in building an online catalog for a medical technology company. Accessible to both sales representatives and customers, the new online catalog would need to replace a cumbersome print catalog with a searchable, always-up-to-date interface. But with device kits composed of many individual parts, the team needed a scalable solution that preserved the relationships between a diverse set of components.

Leveraging Health Connective’s medtech expertise, our development team designed a custom platform that addressed not only the product-relationship challenge, but several considerations that may not exist in other sectors. The key features included:

• Product Alignment: Whether users search for an individual part or a product kit, the online catalog finds and displays all the related equipment. A typical, non-healthcare approach to online catalogs is to treat every product SKU as a discrete item—a fatal mistake that would have required starting from scratch when the error was discovered.
• Multiple Search Filters: Users can drill down to search for products by kit, part, product name, product number, procedure type—even competitor codes. Several custom parameters enable sales representatives and customers to access the catalog data however it is most meaningful to them.
• Fast Page Load: Healthcare is not exempt from the frictionless online experience users have come to expect. Our team worked to ensure that the infrastructure required to support product interdependence was not permitted to slow down performance. According to Google, the consumer bounce rate increases 32% between 1 second and 3 seconds of page load time. Amazon famously calculated that it loses $1.6 billion in sales annually for every extra second it takes a page to load.
• Intelligent Search: A built-in system for common typos and misspellings helps users consistently find the results they are expecting. Even bar codes and pin codes were reviewed for accessibility. The entire system was designed to facilitate search without becoming so “helpful” as to inadvertently impede it.

Used daily by sales reps and customers alike, the online catalog drives both new business and cost savings. In addition to simplifying the ordering process for customers, it eliminated the significant expense associated with maintaining a printed catalog. The online catalog is also scalable and can be easily extended for implementation by other departments.

Health Connective’s online product catalog can also be expanded to include ecommerce. The platform was built to support full shopping cart functionality, modeled after Amazon with some of the most sophisticated tools available. It can be activated quickly as soon as the team is ready to take the next step.

Healthcare data isn’t worth much if no one can access it. Although the volume of healthcare data grew 878% between 2016 and 2019 alone, Black Book estimates that 90% of the data in provider organizations remains unutilized.

The surgical case review portals we have built are bucking the trend, getting critical data out of unstructured lakes and into the hands of the people who can use it to improve patient care. Custom built for surgical robots, our platforms interpret the reams of data collected during procedures, making it accessible to health system clients in various forms.

Designing these systems is no simple task, as each department in a health system comes to a database looking for different information in very different formats. The Health Connective development team focuses first on parsing the data to make it meaningful for each user type, then on optimizing the interface to deliver the most appropriate user experiences.

The result is an extremely versatile dashboard with potential for an extraordinarily broad user base, including:

• Physicians, who may use these dashboards to review their own procedures and to train others. We have even built dashboards to process videos captured by a device, making them easily accessible for online viewing, editing, or for export into presentations. Playback capability is a critical feature that facilitates continued improvement in patient care.
• Clinical administrators, who aggregate data to evaluate outcomes, searching for cases where the actual surgical pathway deviated from the expected pathway, or for links in cases with adverse events. Our dashboards enable them to pull data by physician, procedure length, diagnosis, and more, using the information to develop new treatment standards and protocols.
• IT security teams, who need to verify that data security protocols are in place to protect patient data. Our team has built dashboards to enable that process.
• Engineers, who need to monitor systems to ensure the device is functioning properly. A dashboard can help them review that information and keep track of any issues that arise.   

As hospitals struggle to make use of data throughout their organizations, surgical case review portals can be a significant selling point. With a streamlined dashboard, customers are getting two solutions in one: a cutting-edge medical device and an analytics platform. While one is upping the standard of care for individual patients, the other is leveraging data to improve care for all patients.

It’s common for medtech companies to execute co-branded advertising campaigns with their medical practice clients to educate communities, generate brand awareness, and create patient engagement opportunities. However, keeping track of approved collateral and campaign statuses can be tedious and time-consuming for local sales teams. A co-branding dashboard makes it easy for local sales teams to select, review, and customize ad collateral for practices, as well as providing important reporting details.

The Co-Branding Dashboard helps local sales teams execute co-branded campaigns with ease by streamlining the process.

Review & Customize Collateral
When putting together ad collateral for co-branded campaigns, most sales teams are only working with a collection of links or a media kit to use as a guideline. With the Co-Branding Dashboard, sales reps can review all available collateral for campaigns, select what the client needs, and enter details to customize the collateral to the practice.

Keep Consistency with Branding & Design
All approved ad templates, from online banner ads to billboards, are uploaded to the dashboard with previews so sales reps and practices can review the options and order what they want. New collateral can be uploaded in the future, so that all reps have access to the latest materials.

Easily Access Compliance Reports & Campaign Management Features
Sales reps are typically working with several practices at once, so it’s important for them to be able to keep track of the details of each campaign. The Co-Branding Dashboard has built-in reporting features to help the sales reps keep track.

Reporting functionality includes:

• Tracking open and past projects
• Viewing all ads selected for a campaign
• Tracking responsible parties for campaigns
• Viewing past projects to model new projects
• Generating reports to identify trends

The Co-Branding dashboard gave the client a centralized location of all collateral related to co-branded campaigns, making it easy for sales reps to show off ad collateral to practices and order the necessary materials within a few quick steps. This allowed them to get co-branded campaigns up and running quickly to help practices attract and educate patients that could benefit from the medtech company’s products.