Featured customer

Digital Transformation in the US Healthcare Experience

Project Overview

Valued at $3.65 trillion, the US healthcare industry is larger than many national economies. Disrupting this giant with new technology is not an easy task, even for the most cutting edge, forward-thinking companies. Yet CareCloud is attempting to do so. They believe healthcare deserves tools that are as modern, well-designed, and easy-to-use as the ones encountered elsewhere in our daily lives.

A few years ago, we joined CareCloud’s efforts when we became their technology partner. We have supported the development of their products which include, among others, cloud-based practice management, electronic health records, and medical billing software and services.

Here we look at how our relationship has evolved since the beginning and the key strengths we bring:

Problem

A shortage of Development Talent

Like many companies in the US, CareCloud was resource-constrained in terms of senior developers, a scarce resource which often prevents businesses from moving faster.

The shortage was disproportionately large in terms of native mobile devs, which CareCloud needed for Breeze and Go, two of their main projects.

CareCloud Go is a revolutionary platform that unifies all clinical, financial, administrative and patient experience data in one seamless system.

According to CareCloud, the recruitment process and ramp up period of candidates had become too long. It required a lot of time and effort to decide between applicants, go through all the paperwork and financial arrangements. Sometimes this could take the company as 4 months.

At the time CareCloud reached out to us, recruiting and scaling their in-house development teams had become costly and time-consuming.

Challenge

Restoring Trust in Outsourcing

CareCloud previously had a negative experience with a former software partner, but they decided to give offshoring another chance when a trusted colleague recommended Santex. We knew it would prove to be challenging, but we do not shy away from any opportunities to improve and gladly accepted the road ahead. From that very moment, the ability to find the right solution was in our hands.

Our human capital department worked around the clock to assemble a team of senior software developers, mobile application developers, business analysts and quality assurance engineers with relevant experience in the life science industry.

Solution

Highly Motivated Blended Project Teams

Initially our work with CareCloud began around mobile development, and from there continued to grow consistently in terms of volume and diversity of tasks. Time and time again we were trusted with new projects thanks to our exceptional retention rates, our capacity for working well together and our aptitude for solving complex issues quickly.

On a technical level, our journey with CareCloud is best summed up in three areas:

1- Coding Standards & Best Practices

During the first phase, we elaborated a refactoring plan to boost the application’s performance. We started by cleaning up the existing code to keep it concise and succinct to ensure readability. Then we decided to implement peer reviews whenever a team member opened a pull request for new code and branching model management for prioritizing features. We also integrated code analysis tools such as Codeclimate and used a continuous integration service (Travis). Finally, we systematized the testing of new features by adding continuous delivery with HockeyApp (now App Center) and generating UI automation tests that allowed us to have automatic regression testing for each new feature.

2- Agile Development Processes

The second phase involved converting teams to agile methodologies and supporting CareCloud with local Scrum Masters. They carried out an agile assessment and identified three areas for improvement:

Developing cross-functional teams in order to remove dependencies and allow each group to work at their own pace, in order to deliver end-to-end features.
Defining working agreements between teams to help establish a list of metrics so that management could have clear insights into the development efforts.
Supporting teams with specific agile training to help incorporate an agile mindset grounded in delivering value to end-users.

3- High-performing DevOps Methodology

Employees in high-performing DevOps organizations spend less time on unplanned work and rework. That is why this phase of our relationship has revolved around the implementation of DevOps: We have optimized infrastructure, stabilized developing environments and documented processes in order to facilitate scalability.

The success of the Santex-CareCloud relationship is evidence that software outsourcing works perfectly when off-shore teams are highly motivated, technically savvy and capable of fusing with the client’s team.