Enabling virtual dental care as a rapid response to the pandemic

HIPAA COMPLIANT TELEMEDICINE APP

The software was developed for our client, a Georgia-based healthcare service, who wanted to quickly provide dental hospitals in the USA with a secure, instant, and up-to-date mobile telemedicine app for online doctor-patient consults. When Covid-19 struck, the demand for virtual doctor visits spiked overnight. The challenge was to develop a product rapidly that would be able to perform at scale without maxing out the capacity of the platform.
The client reached out to iTech, a proven software development company, in the healthcare space.

Value delivered

iTech immediately mobilized a team of 6 to quickly launch to market the cloud-based, virtual dental consultation product. From start to finish the desktop and mobile compatible application was completed in the record time of 4 months. The team focused on 4 objectives:

Patient data customization

The application we developed, allows the practice to customize the data requirements for a patient prior to initial consultation and allows patients to register online with the required details. It also allows users to securely upload reports, lab results and other documents to share with the consulting doctor.

It was a vital criterion for virtual consultation that transmitting and securing electronic health data (EHR) had to be compliant with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We developed a HIPAA compliant file management platform that secures all files in transit and is stored at rest using encryption technology.

Doctor dashboard

The data that is provided by the patient and the medical notes made by the consulting doctor can be easily accessed in the dentist’s dashboard. Doctors also have the option to set up evaluation types and initial recommendations and respond to the patient through an integrated messaging system that allows for two-way communication between the doctor and the patient.

Video conferencing technology

Of course, dentists cannot treat every patient online but a teledentistry solution, especially for a first consult, is finding greater acceptance by patients as it reduces the patient footprint in a dental clinic and hence the risk of transmission. The features we developed in the application were:

The dentist and patient could connect through a secure video call or voice call on their smartphones, desktop or tablets.
The dentist could ask the patient to upload pictures if needed to better examine the oral issues.
The dentist has easy access to the patient’s medical history through EHR/EMR integration with the teledentistry application.
The doctor can write medical notes simultaneously with the audio or video call that will get saved to the patient’s profile.

Notification management

The application can be configured to send push notifications both to the doctors and patients to inform them about upcoming appointments. Through a notification center in the admin settings, the notifications can be automated to be sent at a certain time to a specific audience or after a certain action is taken on the user interface.

Clinics and Doctors

Secure and immediate access to the patient’s data
Expanded the coverage of services.
Real-time remote consultation.
Easily managed workflows
Enhancing the end profitability

Patients

Easy access to professional advice
Rapid onboarding process
Flexible and convenient.
Easily managed workflows
Minimizes trips to the dental facility.
Easy to upload documents and images.

The Tech Stack

Front end: Angular

Back end: Node JS

Database: PostgreSQL

Cloud Server: AWS

Video conferencing server: Jitsi video conferencing software.

The product is marketed as a subscription-based model and allows medical practices to set up remote consultations through video conferencing in a matter of minutes. eHealth is booming now and we are seeing a growing interest in telemedicine app development