When a cancer patient isn’t responding to a treatment, it really sucks. Fortunately there are many clinical trials of new treatments that bring hope—and hopefully cures. Our client — imaging research leaders at a world-renowned hospital in Boston — had an existing oncology clinical trial tracking app, developed over the previous decade, that had maxed out and needed to be overhauled for it to continue to succeed on a nationwide scale. They came to pod to make it happen.
Assessing patients and monitoring outcomes is a very complicated process: CT scans and tumor measurements are scheduled, tracked, and analyzed for thousands of patients whose lives are at stake. pod’s design, UX, and technology teams did a deep dive with clinicians, and administrators to understand and streamline a very complex business workflow. Application modules were built iteratively, with ongoing client feedback.
Clean user-friendly design—with a robust and secure backend that’s extensible—has transformed this web app to be cancer center-ready and commercially viable on a much larger scale. It integrates with existing (and future) imaging systems. Since the redesign, our client has received many new inquiries. They continue to collaborate with pod to create and roll out new features. Best of all, this app will support validation of new cancer cures.
The front-end was built as a single-page application with AngularJS, Lodash, and Bootstrap. The front-end talked to a server-side API built with ASP.NET WebAPI with Entity Framework providing database access. This architecture provided a clean split between UI and business logic, and allowed for simpler integration with external applications through the same API.
Our client, a large financial services corporation based in Boston, wanted to create a website for a new service for small and mid-sized employers across the US. Their challenge: while they knew what they wanted the offering to be, they weren’t sure how to translate that offering into a website, and then didn’t know if the required integrations with their current systems would be possible by their target launch date. (Oh, did we not mention that they wanted the site branding, design, content development and construction to be completed in less than 7 months?)
pod, plus our user experience (UX) design partner BlackPepper, and our visual design/branding partner Stoltze Design, dove right in. Since the timeline was very aggressive, we took a two-staged approach: designing, building and launching the public marketing site first, and then designing, building and launching the private site for enrolled customers. As much as possible, we overlapped phases. We helped the client to make decisions about their offering, and how the website would present that offering to their prospective customers and enrolled customers. Once the “what” and “how” were decided, pod built the site in Drupal.
The public/marketing site, built in Drupal 7, launched just six months after the project started, right on schedule. The private/logged-in portion of the site was next, and pod was able to finish building that before the site content had been completed. pod is now working with our client to take their offering to the next level, with more complex integrations with their existing systems in order to allow users to pass seamlessly from this site to other client systems without having to log in again. And long term, our client hopes to pull data from those other systems into this site to provide a consistent user experience to their customers.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has the institutional backing to make the digital heritage of the United States of America available to all. With the Alfred P Sloan Foundation’s support, DPLA needed a trusted partner to make their vision a reality: to aggregate data from hundreds of US private and public institutions, reliably publish data through an API, and usefully present content on their website.
With proven experience of creating and developing data-intensive websites, pod designed the overall architecture, and provided technical oversight and implementation of the API and ingest engine. pod orchestrated the process of selecting and engaging the website’s frontend designer, and managed a development team to create data-driven mobile-friendly responsive layouts. We delivered an expandable solution, from start-to-finish,
on time and on budget.
pod helped the Digital Public Library of America be well-poised to achieve its vision to continuously gather and distribute USA's heritage data from all 50 states.
”www.dp.la launched in 2013 with over 2-million records and was listed as one of Top 50 Websites of 2013 and the American Association of School Librarians’ Best Websites for Teaching & Learning; two years later the collection grew to more than 11-million—a 550% increase—and will continue to grow exponentially; at the same time, 12 service-and-content hubs have more than doubled to 28 hubs—aggregating metadata from more than 1,600 institutions from 15 states (with more to come!). At least 30 third-party applications use the API, and many more are expected.
Technologies
Links
Our client, a small healthcare services company, had landed their largest contract to-date. The new contract would expand our client’s services more than three-fold over the next year, by requiring that they provide services geared towards enhancing their clients’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Star Rating while producing better patient health outcomes. In order to capitalize on this opportunity, our client needed to rapidly implement new features into their existing application without disrupting the operation of several dozen clinicians and pharmacists that use the system to complete their core daily workflow.
Our project management and development team members collaborated with our client, leveraging knowledge that the pod team had for the subject matter and the technical landscape. Our team worked with the client to quickly understand the most important success criteria for the project and to establish a roadmap and a timeline to achieve success.
pod team members drove the Star initiative from inception to completion by working directly with our client’s clinical subject matter expert, senior leadership, and account management teams to ensure the final product would meet CMS requirements as well as meet utilization guidelines by clinicians out in the field.
The depth and breadth of knowledge and capability that pod brings to the table is significant and has allowed us to provide our clinical and operational staff with a product suite that enables them to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. pod’s flexibility, collaborative approach, and broad industry-wide knowledge base has enabled Dovetail Health to consistently improve and enhance our software and its marketability.
”The Stars module was launched one week before the deadline. Four months later our team was hired once more to address phases 2 and 3 of the Star project, as the first phase was met with high levels of approval and our client was able to leverage the new modules into additional contracts for multiple states across the country.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society wants to keep linked content on the internet accessible. Links can fail because of denial of service attacks, censorship, or link rot. Reliably accessing linked content is a problem for Internet users everywhere. The Berkman Center approached pod to build tools for website creators to keep content they’ve linked to available.
pod designed and implemented plugins for the most popular open source content management systems (Drupal, WordPress) and web servers (Apache, Nginx).
Amber — an open source tool for websites to provide their visitors persistent routes to information — is now available. It automatically preserves a snapshot of every page linked to on a website, giving visitors a fallback option if links become inaccessible. So if we were to link to another website from this article, and that destination website were to go down, you can still access a stored, alternate version of the destination website. This safeguards the promise of the URL: that information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions.
Amber is now available for Apache and Nginx webservers, as well as Drupal and WordPress-based websites.
This project presented an interesting technology challenge: how to create a maintainable software solution that provides the same end user experience and functionality for different types of systems (web servers, content management systems), each with their own extension model.
pod created a shared PHP library to handle the core ‘snapshot’ functionality, and common front-end Javascript to drive the end user experience. Each platform has custom code providing the “glue” to integrate Amber into the page delivery process, implemented in PHP for WordPress and Drupal, and in C for Apache and Nginx.
A local financial services client employs over 900 people across the globe. They decided to move their custom enterprise HR system to the cloud-based Workday Human Capital Management platform because it satisfied almost every one of their requirements to support the employee lifecycle. It did not however quite fit their compensation functionality requirements. In order to make the switch, they needed help figuring out how to execute the tricky integration between their legacy compensation system and Workday.
pod chose to use SQL Server Integration Services and developed clients for Workday’s REST API, using Custom Script tasks in C#. This made sense because the technology stack already had a broad footprint across the organization. The ease of managing and scheduling recurring tasks in SQL Server, plus pod’s deep integration experience made this an easy choice.
Workday is a powerful platform, but nothing is ever perfect. Organizations who encounter obstacles to adopting Workday because of functional limitations should consider Workday’s substantial integration capabilities with legacy applications. pod has the know-how to make these powerful, straightforward APIs do what’s needed; we’ve done it before.