Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is a non-profit organization that hosts multiple global conference events for healthcare professionals to connect on the latest innovations in health and wellness, featuring talks and resources from leading medical scientists and subject matter experts.
Provide a digital solution to connect their vast network of healthcare professionals in the form of an Accelerate Application. Our team of product designers and engineers worked closely with the HIMSS team on UI/UX Design and Software Development and provided a cross-functional team of 16 to assist in building out the digital platform over the span of 1 year.
The HIMSS Accelerate application was developed on a React.js/Typescript front-end and PostgreSQL & Sequelize back-end and hosted on Heroku with an eventual transition to AWS. The Styled-components library was heavily used along with Storybook.
Additionally, React Testing Library was used to test and mock frontend component. For end-to-end testing Cypress tests were created which would run on every opened Github PR. QA Testers were responsible for validating that a story ticket fulfilled acceptance criteria defined in the Jira ticket.
On onboarding of the website, we helped implement data collection of organization information, interests, professional goals, as well as users and organizations to follow.
We worked with the existing HIMSS development team to fix bugs to increase loading speed. Implemented the CDN Cloudinary to transform user avatars into smaller images, improving loading speed on the site significantly.
Our engineers worked on the creation and modification of a PostgreSQL database that included over 30 tables detailing users, events, organizations, groups, and more and contributed to the creation of new tables, adding columns to existing tables, architecting a backend gamification plan, and handling relationships between values.
Search is an important aspect of any social media website. Implementing elastic search in onboarding, search page, and profile editing increased existing site speed tenfold.
The menu bar was redesigned to align with the new design system, and to be more structured based on different categories.
Our engineers played a key role in maintenance on the site, solving bug tickets, and spearheading internal campaigns, to increase network speeds across the application. An audit of the platform was conducted to identify upgrades to make from a network phase. Developers from the team were able to deduce problems when the development environment crashed in the days leading up to the global conference, caching issues that were causing problems loading on the site, and ran architecture meetings to discuss future folder structures and measures to implement best practices.
A likes feature including like counts and people who liked a particular item was implemented.
To automated selector for city, country, and State, we utilized a react library that returned information based on previously entered data. It captures 95% of locations around the world and allows users outside the US with differing territory information to enter the correct profile information (territory, province, etc).
There was an active effort toward migrating the initial design system of the Storybook library to a new design. Developers worked closely with the design team in order to transition existing designs to the new cohesive system. The component library is hosted as a bespoke package on NPM, allowing for easy iterative development since each release had its own version number. When the work was completed on upgrading the component library to the new design system, updating the React Repository was as simple as upgrading the version of the component library NPM package to the latest version.
In addition to the core community platform and social networking experience, we also designed and built the eLearning experience on the Accelerate platform. The underlying platform used is Open edX, and the effort included configuring and hosting the Open edX platform on an AWS environment.
The key features included Course Catalog, Course Status, Partner Courses, SCORM Support, Assessments, Certificates, and more.
We created an AWS infrastructure for the HIMSS Open edX Instance. Students can view courses and enroll using the LMS URL. Instructors can post courses on Studio (CMS) using the CMS URL.
SCORM content is stored on an EBS volume. Media files for any courses are stored on an S3 bucket with CloudFront distribution. Course data and forum discussions are stored on MongoDB. MongoDB is deployed on an EC2 instance. User and Insights data is stored on RDS.
HIMSS was able to launch Accelerate in time for their Global Conference in August 2021. They were able to onboard several learning partners contributing content and offer eLearning and certifications on the platform.
The application has a growing audience of thousands of users across the globe and serves as a destination to connect with peers in the industry outside of the global conference, and a destination to get training and certifications from HIMSS and several partners.
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