Project Description

• Background or problem statement: 

The Hub is currently deployed in various settings across different disease domains; while each environment relies on the same core infrastructure, there are customizations required for each environment. For example, all user registrations require the same basic demographic information. However, TB registration may request recent symptoms and a diagnostic result, while a PLHIV registration may ask for co-morbidities. Similarly, a research program may want a more exhaustive report section whereas a programmatic implementation may require top-line indicators. The platform was designed to handle these customizations, and we are proposing below several enhancements to help put those selections in the hands of users. As of now, our team manages most of these customizations at the outset of a new project. 

• Objectives of the proposed Solution: 

In this proposal, we focus changes on three main interfaces to further improve our solution and provide a comprehensive easy to setup and use platform.

1. Automating Deployment Setup - The current platform setup and launch time is close to 6-8 weeks depending on the partner’s need. While we can physically set up a new deployment in seconds, the real work is in understanding and customizing partner requests. These requests are mostly structured and therefore can be automated. We propose to upgrade our current offering to an off-the-shelf solution that is easy to set up, implement and adopt with little to no customization needed. The vision is to automate deployment setup along with options to choose from a list of available features and modules. For example, a user may want to use a local SMS vendor, or hide a module that is not relevant to their context. Through our enhanced module, they could make those changes in their own deployment. With just a few clicks our partners should be able to get their platform up and running. This process would ensure a lower setup cost and reduced time to launch. 

2. Patient Interface – Currently we provide 2 interfaces: one for researchers (with hidden PII) and the other for staff. The primary goal of these interfaces is mediated care, where the user is a healthcare worker or researcher. It supports the entire cascade of care from registration, diagnostics, follow up, digital payments, virtual care and engagement, and digital adherence technologies. Each stage models a stage in the patient’s recovery journey. We would like to develop and deploy a companion application to citizens and patients via an Android App interface using which they can learn about their symptoms, assess their personal risk, view their treatment details, receive reminders to take medications at home, and monitor the status of their government-issued benefits.  This tool would further empower citizens and patients to engage with the healthcare system directly through their smartphones. While we have started development of such an application, it is highly context specific and has not been globally deployed.

3. Customizable Dashboard view - Currently, we provide preset reports and data to our partners. In addition to these default reports, we would like to provide customized dashboard views and reports that are relevant to stakeholders and will be built over the data collected vide staff / patient interfaces or data can be imported (as per the specified format) from external applications as well. It will allow for a panoramic, as well as a detailed view and allow users to customize what data is exported. Data will be structured in dedicated data marts in virtualized semantic layers, which are business-focused, trustworthy, and faster than an on-premise warehouse backend. The platform would help leverage insights pertaining to custom queries, unexpected duplicates, erroneous, extreme, or fictional data values, irregular transaction volumes, time-series data patterns and geographical location anomalies. Security restrictions can be managed for users’ and objects’ access. In short, the platform captures large amounts of data and we want to build a better front end to empower users’ better control over accessing their data.

• Deliverables & Schedule with Estimated Budget:

We estimate that we can complete the overall objectives in 9 months, subject to the final requirements for each module. Some activities can happen in parallel, but the core engineering developments would happen sequentially. 

We create training and scaffolding tools to enhance local capacity. We will use a combination of audiovisual materials explaining each module, alongside interactive tutorials in the web and app to walk new users through workflows.

• Risk Mitigation: 

The Everwell Quality Assurance (QA) team ensures that all features shipped have gone through rigorous manual and automated testing. Our team follows technical releases on fixed days, whereby any newly developed code is first deployed on a beta server to allow for robust testing and quality assurance. We have a suite of automated tests that cover basic workflows and ensure scalability and uptime of releases, as well as manual workflow testing. Code releases are only pushed into production environments when all QA processes and testing are passed.

Everwell is an ISO 27001 Certified organization and maintains the good practice framework as per ISO 27001 protocols for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining and improving an information security and management system (ISMS). We implement best practices in data security and privacy, and take extreme precautions to protect data captured on the platform. We also rely heavily on our partner network for guidance and feedback on feature development, and would take their feedback for any proposed designs.