Digitalising healthcare has been a hot topic for a while now, especially after a few years of lockdowns, vaccine trials, and novel research on possible pandemics. Everything from track and trace apps to controversial vaccine passports is a topic.
Thorgate has been building healthtech software for the last ten years, knowing that innovative digital products in healthcare are crucial for saving lives and advancing the medical sector to make it more accessible and cost-effective.
Building healthtech software is complex and expensive; therefore, it is vital to understand the choice of technologies when building the product. We at Thorgate have found a tech stack with Python (with Django framework and React.js) at its core to be the ideal solution due to the following reasons:
- Python is robust, so programmers can focus on functionality instead of being held up on security-related issues.
- Machine Learning is currently used in all sorts of e-health applications, and when it comes to efficiency in Machine Learning, Python is the best solution.
- Python is also incredibly easy to learn, which means that you can bring in a team of programmers specialised in different languages and quickly have them all coding in Python.
Read More on Why you should use Python in e-health.
We’ve built some excellent e-health products in the past few years that demonstrate how we harness the power of Python to digitalise healthcare. We’ve briefly summarised our top three digital products of ours.
Nordic Brain Tech
Thorgate is helping Nordic Brain Tech (NBT) create a unique technology to reduce migraine headaches. The revolutionary technology under development is called Cerebri, which uses biofeedback in headache treatment.
This solution is composed of wireless sensors and a treatment program in an application. Together, these gather data about heart rate, surface temperature, and neck muscle tension. This information is shown to the user via the application. Based on that, recommendations are made to prevent a headache through a combination of mental exercises and doctor's prescriptions.
Prior to this, Thorgate and NBT also built a product called BrainTwin, which is already accessible to the end-users as a mobile application. It allows the users to keep a headache diary and record the location of the headache as well as medication intakes, thus helping to diagnose the underlying causes of migraine attacks better.
Python, Django and React Native are at the core of these applications. We used React Native along with Python for multiple reasons. For instance, it uses native components that compile directly to the device’s machine language. Also, there are multiple ways of speeding up development, such as interfacing with third-party plugins for using the device’s functionality (e.g. accelerometer and gyroscope).
Hence, going back to the element of security in e-health, Python and React Native combined inherently simplify and, to much extent, solve this problem.
Read More on Nordic Brain Tech
HealX
Thorgate designed a data gathering and management platform to carry out drug repurposing through artificial intelligence (AI). Healx has the world’s most efficient AI platform for rare diseases. It makes drug discovery faster, smarter and more effective and supports its team and partners in discovering and translating new treatments towards the clinic. The rare disease market suffers from high prices due to the small scale of the industry; being focused on small groups, the costs for investigation, drugs and medical procedures are astronomical. This is where HealX enters.
When working with HealX, we agreed that instead of rushing into development, we’d ensure that the soon-to-be-developed solution actually meets the requirements of both the client and the end users. So we started from scratch with a lean requirements workshop. We created detailed user flows and confirmed integrations as part of this initial MVP workshop. This helped us create a clickable prototype. We created the patient side on React.js and the HealX side on Django Admin.
We created a user-friendly solution through the clickable prototype with an excellent interface and moved the process from Excel sheets and joint messaging boards to a common platform. Now, armed with a visual interface of the final solution, the client could showcase the platform to the end users.
TXP Chat
We built the only secure, HIPAA-compliant communication system dedicated to Transplant Centers and Organ Procurement Organizations' unique needs. TXP Chat is a secure mobile messaging application by OmniLife which is uniquely designed for the decentralised and complex communication inherent in organ referrals, offerings, allocation, procurement and transplantation. It is a faster and more modern alternative to fax.
We helped set up the React Native Application, with backend code in node.js using typescript. We also pointed out the security issues, helped omnilife make the API for the chat application, and offered product consultancy and the great UX of the mobile app.
To make the application both secure and efficient, we included biometric authentication and kept the backend cloud secure. The entire development process was very agile. With most of the code base in react native, the client could reuse 60% of it when porting it over to the web. Moreover, we automated the releases for the client, which means they don’t have to manually build the app, go to google play and enter the metadata. Instead, they can just run a command for both android and iOS stores to update the App.
If you’d like to discuss more about innovation in healthtech, then feel free to reach out to our healthtech key account manager, Evelin Mutli at evelin@thorgate.eu
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