Overview
Our EMR software development company designed the app to connect caregivers, patients, and families in one virtual space. Backed up by robust code and intuitive design, this cross-platform solution automates and simplifies patient and doctor interactions with the help of a variety of tools including appointment scheduling, medication reminders, interactive chat, and many others.
At a glance
- Client: US provider of specialized healthcare software
- Product: Multi-tenant, HIPAA and GDPR compliant messaging and file-sharing platform
- Platforms: iOS, Android (phone and tablet), web portal
- Integrations at launch: Epic, Allscripts, athenahealth, plus additional proprietary EHR and hospital information systems
The Challenge
Our client sells software to US skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, home care and home health agencies, private duty operators, and decentralized clinical trial teams. Across all four segments they kept hearing the same complaint from two directions at once.
Physicians and caregivers were out of sync — the person writing the orders and the person executing them were exchanging information through voicemail and fax. And clinical staff were spending real time on the phone bringing families up to date, one call at a time, repeating the same update to a daughter in one state and a son in another.
That gap has a documented cost. A meta-analysis found that systematically integrating caregivers into discharge planning was associated with 25% fewer readmissions at 90 days and 24% fewer at 180 days among older adults returning to a community setting.
The people doing that caregiving are not a niche group: AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving counted 63 million American family caregivers in 2025, up 45% since 2015, with more than half performing medical or nursing tasks and only about 20% trained to do them.
The client’s brief was to build a holistic solution that automates the key steps in patient care and reduces the risk of human error.
One constraint shaped every architectural decision: their end customers run on a wide range of proprietary EHR and hospital information systems, so the product had to be integration-friendly from day one rather than integration-capable later.
Who Uses It
- Skilled nursing and assisted living — coordinating between floor nurses, attending physicians, and adult children who visit on weekends
- Home care, home health, and private duty — where the caregiver is often alone in someone’s house with no colleague to ask
- Decentralized clinical trials — where a participant’s household is effectively part of the study site, and where roughly 25–30% of enrolled participants drop out across the industry
Secure messaging and file sharing sit at the core. Each patient gets a set of chat rooms, with the number capped by the customer’s subscription tier — a design choice that ties the product’s central function directly to its commercial model, and one that had to be enforced server-side rather than hidden in the interface.
The messaging layer supports the things people expect from consumer chat and almost never get in clinical software: multiple file formats, private one-to-one threads inside a group, pinned messages, replies, quoting, forwarding, and reactions. Reactions sound trivial until you watch a night nurse acknowledge eleven updates in four seconds instead of typing “got it” eleven times.
A medication planner and appointment scheduler sit alongside the chat, so the plan and the conversation about the plan live in the same place. Notifications and reminders push to both.
A chatbot keeps the thread alive. It prompts the group about upcoming events and flags schedule conflicts before they become missed visits. Its remit is deliberately narrow: logistics and nudges, never clinical guidance. In modeling, that scope handles roughly 34% of routine inbound questions without pulling in a staff member.
Two-factor authentication and encryption apply across both clients. The app is HIPAA and GDPR compliant, delivered as a mobile application for phone and tablet plus a web portal for staff who work at a desk.
Building an EHR-Agnostic Integration Framework
The integration requirement was the hard part. Selling into facilities that each run something different means the connector cannot be bespoke work every time — it has to be a product surface.
We built an adapter layer that normalizes patient demographics, appointments, and medication data into a single internal model, then wrote per-system connectors against it. The first connector took eleven weeks. Subsequent ones landed in four to five. Epic, Allscripts, and athenahealth went live first; additional systems followed on the same framework.
Two rules held throughout. The EHR stays the source of truth for anything clinical — the app reads far more than it writes. And family members are never provisioned as EHR users; the platform maintains its own identity layer and maps relationships to patient records through consent records that carry a timestamp and a revocation path.
How the Team Worked
We mapped three journeys separately before designing one. Nurse, family member, and physician want incompatible things from the same feature. Families want more information. Clinicians want fewer interruptions. Physicians want a record they can defend. The room structure — capped, scoped, with private threads inside groups — is the compromise those three requirements forced.
We treated the subscription cap as a security boundary, not a billing rule. Room limits are enforced at the API alongside tenant isolation, so a misconfigured client build cannot leak a room across facilities.
We designed for the least confident user in the group. Tap targets, type scale, and plain-language labels were set for an adult child opening the app at 11 p.m. and a night-shift nurse working one-handed — not for a power user.
We prioritized QA around the failure modes that turn a convenience feature into a breach report: permission revocation, role escalation, PHI leaking into notification payloads, and offline message queuing on unstable facility Wi-Fi.
We shipped the integration framework before the second integration. Building the adapter layer while only one connector existed cost time upfront and is the reason the rest landed in weeks rather than months.
Results
Adoption, first 90 days per facility
- 3.4 people in the average patient care circle
- 61% of invited family members complete registration within seven days
- 48% of caregivers still active at day 30
- 11 messages per care circle per week, median
Delivered
Cross-platform release on iOS, Android, and web from a shared API. Three EHR integrations at launch on a reusable adapter framework. HIPAA and GDPR compliance with 2FA, encryption at rest and in transit, and full audit logging. 99.9% uptime with p95 message delivery under two seconds.
Discuss your project with us today!
Contact UsFAQs
Why not just use a consumer messaging app?
No BAA, no audit trail, no way to revoke one person’s access without rebuilding the group, and file sharing that puts PHI on a server nobody has a compliance agreement with.
How does the subscription tiering work?
Room count per patient is capped by plan and enforced at the API. Facilities scale up without a migration.
Can it connect to an EHR that isn't Epic, Allscripts, or athenahealth?
Yes. The adapter framework is the product; individual connectors sit on top of it.
Does the chatbot give medical advice?
No. Scheduling, reminders, and conflict detection only. Anything clinical routes to a human.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading...
