Sector(s)
Team Members
The ability for patients to manage their healthcare remotely became increasingly important because of the 2019 global pandemic.
VitalAire, a leading provider of healthcare services, and its parent company, Air Liquide, recognized an opportunity to improve the patient experience through the digitization of medical supply refills. To accomplish this goal, VitalAire turned to EPAM to develop a commerce-enabled next-generation patient portal that would support its patients who need lifelong care to manage their diabetes.
About the project
The challenge: launching VitalAire's new patient portal in 5 weeks
Prior to creating the patient portal, VitalAire had no digital touchpoint for patients and customers. Back-office teams—primarily working through call centers and separate offline processes—faced high call volume, repetitive tasks and general process inefficiencies, which ultimately impacted customer satisfaction. An eCommerce integration was also needed, as VitalAire had no existing commerce solution in place.
Being able to give our healthcare customers easy access to their daily necessities is key to providing a really successful and life-sustaining therapy to the patient.Hannes Frank, Head of Marketing & Product Management, VitalAire GmbH
To attract new customers, improve the patient journey and ensure a user-friendly experience, VitalAire needed to create a digital platform that would enable customers to order refills and supplies online and offer superior features and functionality, enhancing the user experience for all site visitors.
Given the upcoming release of an innovative new insulin pump product, VitalAire needed to move quickly to bring this new patient portal to market before its competition did the same. As a result, VitalAire tasked EPAM with implementing the solution in just five weeks.
Back to topThe solution: rapid implementation of a powerful platform
Together with the reliable and experienced team at EPAM, we have created a great solution in an impressively short time that does exactly that!Hannes Frank, Head of Marketing & Product Management, VitalAire GmbH
The platform provides many benefits and:
- Delivers comprehensive Drupal infrastructure support from development and staging to production
- Mitigates infrastructure-related time challenges and enables development teams to concentrate on the solution itself
- Offers powerful developer-facing user interfaces, a strong focus on security, a robust API and automated deployment from a version-controlled code repository
Important improvements were also made to customer profiles. The enhanced profiles enable VitalAire patients to:
- Upload prescriptions
- View up-to-date order status
- View extended order details and sort orders by various parameters
- Request appointments and view orders placed via other sales channels
- Track orders and determine when to reorder supplies
The new VitalAire patient portal, with its prescription-based ordering tool, was completed and launched on time and within budget in May 2020. Patients can now remotely manage their diabetes treatments and easily reorder supplies from home.
The result: enhancing the patient experience
Following the implementation of the patient portal that enabled online sales of the insulin pump, the second phase of the project extended the eShop and its commerce capabilities to incorporate other therapy areas and included a full visual redesign of the existing web portal, further improving the end-to-end user experience.
In 2020, after the site was launched, VitalAire and EPAM were recognized with an Acquia Engage Award in the “Building a Better Tomorrow” category.
Why Drupal was chosen
EPAM worked quickly with VitalAire to conduct a discovery workshop and kickoff planning for the first phase of the initiative.
Drupal was selected as the content management system (CMS) due to VitalAire’s familiarity with the platform and because of its cost, flexibility and contributed module ecosystem that lent itself to both the rapid implementation period as well as planned future enhancements.
For the commerce functionality, commercetools was selected for its ease of integration with Drupal, powerful APIs, strong data security and excellent performance due to its microservice architecture.
As a Global Level Acquia Partner with expertise in Drupal and the Acquia Open DXP, EPAM advised VitalAire to host the solution on the Acquia Cloud Platform.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Themes:
- Base theme: Barrio Bootstrap 5 Theme
- Admin theme: Adminimal - Responsive Administration Theme & its suites of tools.
Key contrib modules:
- Paragraphs - for modelling and managing content, and also mapping content object to UI components.
- Search API & Facets - Advanced high-quality search experience.
- Remote Stream Wrapper - helped to pull content from remote 3rd party service.
- Swift Mailer - to tailor the design of good looking and patient friendly emails.
A series of third party libraries have been used to interact with commercetools and payment gateways.
