Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is a non-profit organization for medical providers involved in innovations in health and wellness. The organization's mission is to improve healthcare through the power of information and technology. They deliver events, education, and insights to the larger global health community, and they use IT and management systems to improve the quality, safety, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility of the health ecosystem.
The project goal was to develop a digital solution for HIMSS’ vast network of healthcare professionals, creating a platform called "Accelerate" where they could connect and exchange ideas. The platform aimed to improve the quality, safety, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility of the health ecosystem by providing healthcare professionals with a valuable resource to improve their knowledge and skills.
Our team of product designers and engineers worked closely with the HIMSS team to deliver a large cross-functional team to help build out the digital platform.
We followed an Agile methodology, conducting regular meetings with the client to ensure that the project was on track and that the final product met their requirements.
We used a combination of React.js, PostgreSQL, and AWS to develop the platform. Our engineers played a key role in the maintenance of the site, solving bug tickets and improving the site's speed.
Quality Assurance was an important aspect of the development process to ensure the functionality and reliability of the product.
Our team designed and implemented an efficient onboarding process for the HIMSS Accelerate platform, which included collecting information about users and organizations to follow. Data was gathered on organization information, interests, and professional goals to help users connect with others in the healthcare community. This process was vital in creating a personalized and engaging experience for users on the platform.
Our team worked on improving the site speed of the HIMSS Accelerate platform by identifying and fixing bugs. We also implemented the CDN Cloudinary to reduce the size of user avatars which helped to increase the loading speed on the site. The result was a noticeable increase in the overall user experience as the platform became more responsive and fast to navigate.
Our team of engineers was responsible for the creation and modification of a PostgreSQL database that included over 30 tables detailing users, events, organizations, groups, and more. They also contributed to the creation of new tables, adding columns to existing tables, architecting a backend gamification plan, and handling relationships between values. This work helped to create a robust and efficient database that supported the overall functionality of the HIMSS Accelerate platform.
To improve the search functionality of the HIMSS Accelerate platform, our team implemented Elastic Search. This technology was integrated in the onboarding, search page, and profile editing which increased the existing site speed tenfold. The implementation of Elastic Search allowed users to quickly and easily find the information they were looking for, thus improving the overall user experience.
Our team redesigned the menu bar of the HIMSS Accelerate platform to align with the new design system and to be more structured based on different categories. This redesign helped to improve the navigation and user experience of the platform.
Our team of engineers played a key role in the maintenance of the HIMSS Accelerate platform, solving bug tickets, and spearheading internal campaigns to increase network speeds across the application. They performed audits of the platform to identify necessary upgrades, resolving issues on the site, and ran architecture meetings to discuss system architecture and best practices. This continuous maintenance helped to ensure the platform's reliability and stability, providing a seamless experience for users.
To increase user engagement on the HIMSS Accelerate platform, our team implemented a likes feature that allowed users to like a particular item and see the like count, as well as who liked it. This feature made the platform more interactive and encouraged users to engage more with the content and other users on the platform.
To automate the selection process for city, country, and state, our team utilized a React library that returned information based on the user's input. Autocomplete helped make the onboarding process more efficient and user-friendly, as users could easily select their location without having to manually type it in. This feature helped to improve the overall user experience by reducing the time and effort required to fill out the information.
A key initiative of the project was to migrate the initial design to a new design system. Our engineering team worked closely with the HIMSS’ design team to transition the existing app designs to the new cohesive system.
Storybook was used by the team to organize and visualize different states and variations of the components, which helped in the development process. It was an important tool for the team to ensure the consistency, and maintainability of the design elements of the platform.
Our team integrated eLearning experience on the HIMSS Accelerate platform, allowing healthcare professionals to access educational resources and learn about new technologies, best practices and more. The eLearning experience was designed to be interactive and engaging, and it was tailored to the specific needs of the healthcare community. This feature helped to enhance the overall value of the platform by providing healthcare professionals with a valuable resource to improve their knowledge and skills.
Open edX was used as the underlying LMS platform. A few key features included a Course Catalog, Course Status, Partner Courses, SCORM Support, Assessments, Certificates, and more.
Our DevOps team was responsible for creating an AWS infrastructure for the HIMSS Open edX Instance. AWS was used as the infrastructure provider to support the platform's development, testing, and production environments. The infrastructure enabled students to view courses and enroll using the LMS URL, and instructors to post courses on Studio (CMS) using the CMS URL.
We stored SCORM content on an Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, media files for courses on an S3 bucket with CloudFront distribution, course data and forum discussions on MongoDB, which was deployed on an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. Additionally, we stored user and insights data on Relational Database Service (RDS). This infrastructure helped to provide scalable, reliable, and secure services to the platform and enabled it to handle the high traffic volumes during peak usage periods.
HIMSS was able to launch Accelerate in time for their Global Conference in August 2021. They were able to onboard several learning partners with 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.
Fill out the form or send us an email so we can get you one step closer to the perfect digital product.
Feel free to reach us via email or phone:
