Ecommerce design & build for blood testing provider
Explore My Health
The brief
Creating an ecommerce store, mobile app and seamless integration with lab providers
Explore My Health came to us with a new business concept: to provide blood testing as an online service, allowing their patients to better understand their health.
They offer a range of tests, including general health tests, heart health tests, and male and female hormone tests, so they needed a platform to help them sell these.
Alongside an ecommerce site, they needed a mobile app that patients could download to see their initial results and keep track of their results in the future to see if lifestyle changes had a positive impact. A robust backend was also required to automatically retrieve results from two lab providers in the healthcare-specific HL7 format and process these securely.
- Build a Woocommerce ecommerce store to provide the front end for the business
- Build a backend system to send test requests to multiple providers by integrating with the front end website
- Build a backend system to retrieve test results and allow doctors to get in and comment on them, before releasing them to a patient
- Build a mobile app using react native, allowing patients to see their recent tests and results
Creating a stand-out website within brand guidelines
The customer facing website needed to stand-out, but also be reassuring for customers. After all, they were trusting Explore My Health with their blood and intimate details about their health.
Their creative agency provided detailed brand guidelines for us to work within for the design of the website. We also needed to make sure this was implemented throughout development.
The store was built on the Woocommerce platform due to its flexibility and ability to allow for complex integrations, such as firing new orders over to a Laravel application that would then send the test requests in HL7 format to the labs.
The backend system
The system underpinning the website and business as a whole was highly complex. We chose Laravel as the programming language of choice thanks to its robust ability to handle mass amounts of data if the business reached scale.
In essence, the role of the backend system was to:
- Receive order details from the front end website when an order was placed
- Convert these order details to HL7 format, detect which lab provider they should be sent to and then place them in the labs secure cloud storage (AWS or Azure)
- Check the lab’s secure storage regularly for new test results (held in HL7 format)
- Process the test results and check the patient’s result against given ranges to see whether the biomarker was low, healthy or high
- Allow for the doctors to log in and view test results when they are ready and then make comments on them and, ultimately, release the test result to the patient via the app
The satisfying thing with the backend system is that it handles a huge amount of admin work in a completely automated fashion, meaning Explore My Health can grow without having to increase administrative staff.
We also built in quality of life features to the app so that admin staff could log in and view processed tests and check they had been processed successfully. This includes showing the HL7 response we received and then logging how the application processed this data. This enables them to troubleshoot easily and revert back to the labs if they have sent something in the wrong format.
The mobile app
We were tasked with creating a customer focused app so that they could see their results when they came in, in a friendly format.
Some of the key criteria for the app included:
- The ability to see multiple tests under their account
- The ability to see overall comments from a doctor about their test results
- The ability to see each biomarker within a test, their result and how this translated to healthy/unhealthy ranges
- The ability to see trends in biomarkers if they’ve had more than one test over time
We built the app in React Native, this meant that we could have a centralised codebase and then export to iOS and Android specific applications, rather than carrying out development work for each platform individually.
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