Next-gen medical charting for future-focused care

Doctor taking notes on digital tablet while meeting a patient.

OVERVIEW

For more than 500 clinics and 1,200 clinicians, InnoCare is tops in electronic charting. But there was a time when legacy software had many losing patience. And sometimes patients. We partnered with InnoCare for an inside-out transformation of its platform, its processes – and most importantly, a patient-first digital charting experience.

Scope

Azure, Solution Ownership, User Experience Design, Architecture & App Development, Agile Coaching, DevOps

Empowering clinicians. Modernizing healthcare.

In Canada’s private healthcare space – physical therapy, chiropractic care, massage therapy, etc. – InnoCare provides charting software to hundreds of clinics, in addition to the 80 they own. That puts the mid-sized company in a unique position to reimagine the role technology can play in providing a more comprehensive care experience for patients and a more efficient one for providers.

These days, good clinicians are in very high demand. But as InnoCare’s legacy charting platform began showing its age, the company was seeing attrition rates climb – especially among millennials – instead of attracting more qualified clinicians as they graduated. Plus, its people were often stuck spinning on paperwork instead doing what they loved: helping patients. InnoCare knew it could do more than solve the problem – it could provide a holistic solution by easing the complexities of medical paperwork, while differentiating itself as a competitor for top healthcare talent.

InnoCare called on Slalom Build for a diagnosis as well as a cure. We worked with InnoCare’s in-house team to stabilize the legacy software, modernize its software delivery capabilities, and migrate data to the cloud with the utmost security in mind.

What we created together has set a new standard in the industry and significantly reduced InnoCare’s day-to-day costs. It’s also earned praise from both clinicians – who feel reengaged in their jobs – and patients who feel better informed.

Medical diagnostic app software on a desktop screen.

Much more than a band-aid solution

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.

Doctor taking notes on digital tablet while meeting with two patients.

Out with the old. In with the cloud.

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.

hands working at a laptop showing data flow diagrams.

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.

Four iPad screen showing a medical diagnostic app.

Less turnover. More revenue. Better care.

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, tailormade experience – because clinicians are back to doing the job they love. Caring for patients.

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