The MediShout app is a digital platform designed to solve various key medical problems in hospitals. It connects staff, equipment suppliers and service maintenance teams, a smart way to ensure that patients receive the most efficient care.
The MediShout app delivers the answer to the real life problems that medical staff are facing daily. Broken IT, estates and facilities problems, faulty equipment or PPE and stock shortages are among the main issues stopping medical staff from taking proper care of their patients.
MediShout not only manages these hospital problems but also improves efficiency and prevents delays by allowing hospital medical staff to instantly report and resolve ward issues.
5300+ shouts
4 team members
5 hospitals covered
Project duration: 6 months in-house development (ongoing)
100+ forms built
3300+ app users (and still counting!)
Responsive design
MediShout is built in a way that makes shout management easy and flawless. Healthcare providers and suppliers receive, communicate and add the actual status of each shout through an intuitive panel. The user selects a ward and problem type, and the shout goes direct to the team responsible for taking care of it. We direct shouts to actually anyone who is interested, and we integrate with third party helpdesks like Olympus or Medusa. For example, in a case of faulty endoscopes, a shout goes directly to the Olympus team, They manage it and send a team member to fix the problem.
Developing a lightweight application was a priority. It had to be simple and accessible so that users find it easy to send a shout. Well designed app navigation helps them send a shout quickly. Sending a shout is as simple as opening the app, selecting the form and filling in the relevant details.
MediShout mobile application was written in Flutter - a very fast growing framework with enormous society solving almost every business problem in record time. The key point why we choose this technology is the very quick development of apps with a beautiful user interface for Android and iOS with one codebase.
MediShout is relatively simple and intuitive and does not require lots of mobile platforms native code base changes so in that case Flutter is the best option. Of course the app is using many more advanced functionalities f.e. Barcode scanning, hiding app in background due to GDPR restrictions, passcode verification coming back from background mode. These kinds of features are relatively easy to develop and maintain in mobile applications, with the technological stack that we use.
The existing app was set up on Firebase which is an easy to start but hard to keep up with business needs solution. We decided to change the technology to Python, Django and Kubernetes - a professional technologies mix that delivers unlimited development possibilities.
The most demanding issue was app adoption, integrating the app with multiple suppliers. This required direct cooperation between our development team and specific external suppliers outside the MediShout organization.
Medical staff can quickly share any operational issue with a user-friendly app. Different reporting pathways are created to solve every kind of problem, from broken computers to low stock and faulty equipment.\
The system allows you to create reports of shouts sent via the app, or export data via an xml. file.
An intuitive dashboard helps navigate through shouts already sent to the system. Suppliers and service providers can get an Excel file of shout data or scan through the history.
The app makes it easy to attach photos of broken equipment, ensuring the engineers have all the information needed to resolve problems.
Whenever a problem is solved, the users are notified.
Suppliers and users can chat to make sure suppliers gather all the information about the problem, which fosters better problem solving.
We have used our standard approach to the infrastructure, leveraging Kubernetes as the main deployment and hosting solution. This gives us the ability to scale if needed, and also automates most deployment processes. We are focusing on making the backend secure, since it handles the core of our business logic. This means the web and mobile apps are fast and lightweight, their main purpose being an end-user interface to the system.
With this setup, we can keep control of every aspect of user management, easily integrate with 3rd parties and focus on implementing business features.
MediShout’s web application is built with React, and written in 100% TypeScript. The backend is our standard solution involving the newest Python version, Django 3 and Django REST Framework. The mobile app is written in Flutter, available for both iOS and Android devices. MediShout is hosted using Microsoft Azure cloud and runs using the cloud Kubernetes engine.
Switching from Google Cloud to Azure was surprisingly easy. Setting up a basic infrastructure for a project, including a testing environment for the dev team,
database servers, file storage, handling of secret values, and automation of TLS certificates were done in one sprint.
Microsoft Azure is a leading infrastructure provider in the industry and was proven compatible with our common technology stack. Although usually considered more tied to other Microsoft technologies, like C# or .NET, it works just as well with our favorite Python tools. We are glad to expand our portfolio with Azure, and we are ready to use it in the future.
