The digital patient education platform for clinical trials

When we were initially approached by Dr. David Grew, a content creator and the founder of the PRIMR platform, it was an intense learning experience. We discussed current workflow for digital patient education, how and when doctors generally leverage supplemental content throughout patients’ medical journey, as well as the technical, user, and regulatory challenges PRIMR should address.

The pre-PRIMR scene was, quite frankly, static, with generally poor user experience for both doctors and patients. At the same time, apart from the user experience alone, there were efficiency issues with content creation. And where content had already existed, concerns existed about security, privacy, and regulatory compliance while providing relevant information to patients and their families.

The initial brainstorming sessions were fairly high-level, so we could fully understand the overall data model not only for the MVP version of the product but for David’s vision of the future. At the same time, we went through extensive mapping and analysis of the two user flows in play—one for doctors leveraging content and the other for patients who then consume it. This was combined with security and compliance in mind for each step of the user flow.

Those discussions shaped one of the primary discussions—developing a mobile application vs. a web application for both parties involved; again, not only for the MVP version but for down the line as well. Considering all aspects, it was decided that a robust and scalable web application suited for all viewports would fulfill the outlined objectives and be a great starting point in order to engage users and gather more data on the app’s functionality to shape further development and product roadmap.

Considering the regulatory frameworks and challenges applicable to the application’s primary use case, i.e., sharing medical educational content with patients and their relatives, the emphasis has been put on choosing the right technologies that would not only be scalable and futureproof, allowing for future growth, but also to ensure HIPAA compliance. With that in mind, well-established and enterprise-ready languages and frameworks have been chosen for development with AWS as an infrastructure platform, which itself provides extensive resources for HIPAA-based applications and use cases.

As video-based infrastructure can be fairly resource-consuming and tricky to get right for any scalable project, Vimeo has been leveraged as the optimal platform for serving video content on the application. Relevant patient engagement analytics data that further add value to the platform is then captured and processed via a combination of Google’s Firebase and BigQuery.

Although PRIMR’s founder David Grew had a well-shaped product roadmap in mind before any development had begun, we all agreed that both internal beta testing and production use of the MVP version of the application would, most likely, reveal highly-valuable feedback from both doctors as well as patients.

With that in mind, an SMS delivery option was added shortly after launch so doctors had the opportunity to deliver the content via two options—email and SMS with the option to utilize both at the same time. This led to higher user engagement as well as improved user experience for those who still rely on SMS as a communication channel.

Additionally, constant and incremental improvements have been made to analytics to better understand how both patients and doctors utilize the app in order to improve user experience and accessibility of content delivery and the learning experience. This quantitative data was then combined with qualitative research through doctors’ interviews, which further shaped the product roadmap in place.