The Customer

In 2013-2015, the Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) went into effect in Canada. Under the supervision of Health Canada, the health care practitioners could prescribe, and the patients could receive cannabis prescriptions in the clinic. But clinics’ capacity was insufficient for all the patients requiring such specific treatment. Our client established a network of seven clinics in Canada intended to provide medical cannabis called Natural Health Services. The company connects patients with safe and effective medical cannabis products through Licensed Producers. It has in-house physicians and nurse practitioners specializing in the endocannabinoid system providing expert consultation, education, and patient recommendations.

Challenges

Natural Health Services quickly became popular. At that time, the customer’s business challenge was complex and imperfect user scheduling capabilities. So, user experience suffered, call centre inquiries were unnecessarily inflated, and the technology team’s burden was high to maintain an acceptable continuity of service.

NHS decided to develop a new scheduling module and a complete overhaul of the existing system to ensure the maximum throughput of the clinics. The system had to store and update patient records and prescriptions, allowing the patient to make online and offline appointments.

The implementation of the scheduling part was puzzling. Different types of patients require different visit duration, practitioners, and locations.

The customer needed a seasoned healthcare IT consulting and development partner to create such an advanced solution and turned to Digicode’s team.

Solution

Digicode assembled a team of experts experienced in the healthcare domain. The project started with thoroughly analyzing the market and the customer’s goals. After that, Digicode’s team conceptualized the product idea, elicited the functional and technical requirements for the system, and developed a unique algorithm in conjunction with the client’s team. Considering each doctor’s schedule, the time of appointment, and the duration of the visit, this algorithm ensured optimal occupancy of the offices.

Digicode’s regulatory compliance consultant assisted in the software design stage to ensure compliance with PIPEDA and other relevant regulations and establish reliable and secure medical data exchange.

Also, our team implemented automatic generation and sending of prescriptions to the manufacturer for the subsequent drug delivery to the patient. Another feature was automatically sending reports to Health Canada to receive compensation for hospitalized patients.

The test engineers tested whether these features worked as intended as soon as the new functionality was deployed.

As a result, Digicode successfully delivered brand-new healthcare software that reduces the offices’ downtime, optimizes the workload of doctors, and provides exceptional patient experience.

Outcomes

Being pleased with the technical skills of Digicode’s medical software development team and smooth project communication, NHS continued the collaboration. They entrusted Digicode with a year-and-a-half project to support the developed software to connect an increasing number of clinics to the system. At the moment, the system continuously supports more than 35 clinics. NHS has more than 150,000 active medical documents and connected 95,000 active patients with safe and legal products through Health Canada-regulated Licensed Producers.