Helium Health

Helium is a MedTech startup that focuses on providing an advanced and beautiful platform for managing hospitals, doctors and patients in emerging markets, especially Africa. Helium is making paper medical records a thing of the past, so doctors can focus on saving lives, rather than on filling forms.

PARTNERSHIP

4 years

Project Overview

As an organization that focuses on the needs of medical facilities, HeliumHealth wanted to improve the way they were functioning. The client asked us to develop software that would be excellent patient records & management achievable for hospitals of all sizes. The product had to be suitable for emerging markets, where the Internet and power supply can be problematic. The solution needed to have a unique possibility to be hosted as an online or on-premise instance. HeliumHealth also had to be really intuitive so that it would require nearly no training to use.

Challenges & Solutions

To allow medical facilities to use either online or hosted solution, in case a hospital faces challenges with the Internet or power supply.

Both online and hosted solutions have their pros and cons. With an online solution, the hospital has access to the newest code and full support. With the on-premise solution, a hospital can be independent from the Internet. Our first step was to use Docker to handle app image, so it can be easily installed on an independent server. Then, we had to create a custom architecture and an admin panel, where on-premise instances could be monitored, configured and updated.

Ensure the highest possible uptime of the application with constant access to the patient's data 24/7, 365 days.

A hospital cannot afford downtimes. Lack of access to patients’ data results in longer patient queues, and could badly affect doctor’s decisions and even cause death. To make sure that the application is available for up to 100% of the time, we used Kubernetes. To make sure that the platform is capable of providing patients data even if something goes wrong, we are working at multiple levels of redundancy. For example hosting a second, parallel instance of our app that is hosted on independent servers. And this is all to make us prepared for a situation like a datacenter downtime.

An intuitive user interface, to minimize the organizational overhead usually imposed by onsite staff trainings.

The user interface is continuously improved as we are constantly learning how doctors and hospital staff is using the product. Even though the main design was done well, we iterate on it and provide quarterly design improvements, to keep the product more intuitive with each iteration.