Custom Care Coordination Portal

At this stage, healthcare consultants interview the organization’s managers and the future end users of the portal (e.g., medical professionals, admins.) to determine the key user roles, the tasks to be completed by each role, and the collaboration workflows between different roles. This helps to determine an optimal feature set and prioritize features according to the healthcare organization’s needs. When planning a feature set, healthcare consultants need to identify relevant regulatory requirements for the care coordination portal (e.g., HIPAA in the U.S. or GDPR in the EU) and outline security features (data encryption, multi-factor authentication, etc.) needed to satisfy them. During the discovery phase, the experts also examine the existing IT ecosystem and prepare a list of solutions to be integrated with the portal. The list should specify data exchange standards that the future portal needs to support (e.g., HL7, FHIR). Finally, healthcare consultants document all the findings in a software requirements specification (SRS).

Solution architects analyze the software requirements and then choose the best-fitting tech stack and architectural style with the healthcare organization’s priorities in mind (minimal maintenance required, fast launch, etc.). At ScienceSoft, we often opt for modular architectures, as they allow for greater flexibility and fault isolation (failure in one module won’t affect the others). This architecture type may suit care coordination portals that require high scalability and integration with multiple systems. However, such software might be costly to maintain, so for smaller healthcare organizations with simpler workflows, a monolith architecture might be a more feasible choice.

Software architects also need to plan the integration of the portal with all the necessary health systems. They identify potential interoperability challenges and determine optimal ways to resolve them. For example, for an integration with a legacy EHR system, implementing middleware might be needed.

When working on the portal's visual look, UX/UI designers focus on ensuring intuitive navigation and minimizing cognitive load for medical staff. UX experts create user personas, which help them understand the pains and goals of the future portal’s users. Then, they design wireframes depicting the portal’s informational structure, touchpoints with the end users, and system responses to the user actions. Lastly, UI designers create high-fidelity mockups with colors, typography, icons, and other visual elements.

Both UX and UI designers create the system’s design to accommodate the established user roles. For example, a referring physician interface may have a simplified layout to track referral status, view recent patient updates, and access communication tools (e.g., direct messaging with the care team of the receiving provider). On the other hand, a dashboard for a primary physician needs to provide a comprehensive view of a complete patient’s medical history, current treatment plans, and upcoming appointments.

Developers build the portal’s back end, create role-specific user interfaces, and implement the necessary integrations with external systems. For example, they may need to develop API connections to facilitate secure data exchange across platforms. To speed up development, testing, integration, and deployment operations, solution engineers implement development automation (e.g., establish CI/CD pipelines, introduce Infrastructure as Code).

QA engineers validate the portal against its functional requirements and assess its usability, performance, and security. A good practice is for developers and testers to work in parallel. This way, critical defects can be revealed and addressed early on.

Finally, the portal is integrated with the necessary systems and deployed in a controlled environment. The development team monitors the portal’s performance and fix any remaining issues. They also prepare maintenance guides for the healthcare organization’s IT team as well as manuals, tutorials, and other training materials for the end users.