Our client is a medicare company providing a substantiated digital health solution for pulmonary disease management. This technology comes in the form of iOS and Android mobile apps for patients and a web application for doctors. It is applied to offer support to those affected in tracking their asthma. The app allows its users to facilitate the systematic evaluation and treatment of the disease. It also encourages clinical decision-making and provides for proactive care management.
The client approached Vilmate driven by the challenge of finding and hiring talented software developers at a reasonable rate. As a startup in its early stages, our client wanted to keep their expenses down to a minimum before growing their business into a company with a larger market share. The main issue they faced was that the application architecture that their existing products had was out of date. That was causing certain troubles with performance and hindered further business growth. The app was meant to be associated with clinically meaningful improvement but brand positioning did not correlate with the actual state of things then. Our client collaborated with Vilmate on their iOS and web applications improvement thus keeping the focus on product optimization.
Although the client had not exercised the staff augmentation model before, they were aware of the advantages the nearshore software development might afford. So, this promise of tangible benefits coupled with the references and testimonials from Vilmate’s past and present customers that the client relied on when choosing us made for the confidence-building and cooperative value creation.
Our partnership started in November 2018. This was the first time for the client that they attempted to assemble a team to work on the optimization of the existing app performance. To identify the key needs of application end-users, we started with reviewing and analyzing the applications on hand. Once the functional requirements and therefore the expected level of collaboration were defined, we made the first move and augmented the client’s team by 1 iOS developer.
Since then, our development team followed two parallel but interdependent threads as part of the process: the modernization of the application architecture and implementation of the high-level business requirements. Later, the Vilmate development team involved in the project extended to include 2 more people: 1 iOS software engineer to become the second iOS developer on a team and 1 web developer who worked on the improvement of the web application.
During our involvement, we managed to identify and address the project’s key pain points:
Migration of the iOS app MVC architecture to MVVM-C. Using an MVVM-C (Model-View-ViewModel-Coordinator) pattern, which is a combination of MVVM and an extra layer of Coordinator, which made the app logic clearer and routing management more easily. Using the power of RxSwift, we implemented reactive programming that allowed this architectural pattern to make for a lot more structure of the iOS application code, as well as for more scalability, maintainability, and testability.
The new functionality development and its incorporation into the iOS application, which was made possible in view of the updated architectural pattern.
The introduction of the new features.
Building and running iOS unit tests that helped verify the logic of newly written code in the app.
Web application code refactoring. Our web developer did a large amount of refactoring to ensure the code clarity and to reduce its unnecessary complexity. Besides, the code that was previously Angular 4 has been rewritten for the latest Angular 8.
The web app responsive redesign that was approached using Sass preprocessor. Equally, the process was established through the implementation of Progressive Web App technology and by adding localization support.
We have been involved in the project execution for a year now. Both applications are already available for use but more improvements are yet to come.
In the course of the collaboration, the Vilmate team managed to successfully update the architecture of the client applications. The team was thorough in their work, project deliverables were defined and tracked, which kept the development process moving along at a predictable pace and let the client put down their expenses still getting fair value back.
The applications were modernized, their productivity and performance — improved. Now, they support adding new patients, appointing doctors to consult them, developing a treatment plan individually tailored to the patient's condition, analyzing medical record data and more. These interim results are laying a solid foundation for future business growth.
