By Vitaly P., a Business Development Manager at Rosberry
A regular project may sometimes reach far beyond where you think it normally goes
I don’t know whether it has ever happened to you throughout your professional career but recently I have experienced some insight which made me look at least at one project my company implemented from a different angle. It has not been the ‘paradigm shift’. It’s been something which usually makes you understand more, though you did not seem to lack this awareness before.
At the beginning of January I was surfing the net reading posts, commenting and sharing and came across the article by Emma Court from Market Watch titled ‘In the age of Uber and Lyft, it’s still hard for some Americans to get to the doctor’. Using New York City’s Bangladeshi growing community as an example Emma tells that the city has one of the best public transit systems in the U.S. Ride-sharing companies are making transportation cheaper, easier and more accessible than ever. However, she points out, many members of the community still have high rates of type 2 diabetes which, as another researcher found, also result from transportation problem. Doctor’s visits, just one part of managing the chronic disease, go missed, especially by female members of the community. They often rely on the family to take them to appointments or, with little or no English, struggle to make the trip on an unfamiliar transit system. So the questions being really raised in the article are how and who can manage the situation and if there is anyone trying to attend to such kind of needs in a more personal and professional way.
Honestly, I would never be able to answer these questions if I did not work at Rosberry, a mobile development studio. Yes, you have read it right, a development company which has nothing to do with a health-care institution. But I will explain.
Actually, last year one of our long-standing clients referred us to a partner, a US-based medical facility, whose management wanted to make their cherished dream come true. It was a project we had good experience and skills for. Technically speaking it had some challenges but was not that difficult and we did what we usually do. We were more than inquisitive to study the target audience and tried to put ourselves in the end-user shoes to make the application functional and friendly. The whole business logic was about making it easier for each patient to get an appointment especially for those who were in need of special transport, care and attention already on a hospital’s doorstep. The issue was that the facility had several branches and did not have its own cars to provide to the patients which were many. The solution to an accessible transportation issue came from partnering with a well-known US on-demand car-service. Use of their API made us sure that if need be, a request generated by our application will be duly processed by their system and a certain type of car will bring a patient to and from the hospital in a timely fashion. The next step was to provide each branch with an automated smart tool which would let them easily handle the patient database, ensure data security, make, confirm and cancel appointments and transportation 24/7 using voice or messages. Google Maps also became a handy solution to monitor the patient’s car approach and help him/her out of the car and to the doctor’s room.
Of course, the application was successfully built and handed over to the client and even more valuable updates are still to come. But that is not the point. What I am driving at is that sometimes you see your jobs as well-done but pretty common and familiar whereas each of these projects may turn valuable to thousands if not millions in need and may reach far beyond where such solutions normally go.
