The Challenge
The Idaho Sound Beginnings (ISB) unit of the Department of Health and Welfare wanted a mobile app to support parents in managing and tracking providers and appointments as their child progressed along the ISB hearing path. Parents seeking assistance for newborns with hearing issues had to juggle multiple appointments from different types of providers, making it challenging to remember what appointments were when, and what information was shared by what provider. ISB envisioned a Parent Portal and Application (PPA) to help parents stay organized and informed when interacting with providers using an easy-to-navigate interface that offered basic data collection and a child-centric view.
Our Approach
We performed all necessary duties of project management, business analysis, design and UX, technical engineering, development, and quality assurance. During discovery, our team accomplished extensive requirements capture and analysis with state stakeholders.
Parents needed to be able to:
- Peruse a provider list provided by ISB to find information about providers including a bio, practice name, and URL, and save providers to their ‘Team’
- Create a record and history of appointments
- Type notes into the PPA
- Link to a self-guided resource library with information in a variety of media
- Search by provider type
The input received from multiple interviews and focus groups with representatives of the target end user community determined the resulting app design. We also accomplished multiple iterative rounds of prototyping. Content for the app would be managed at the state program level, so we decided to use a back-end Drupal implementation to push information and updates to the mobile end users. The actual mobile client, in turn, was built using Native React.
The Result
The resulting solution offers parents of newborns access to a curated library of information, which, in part, provides vital orientation to the process and the available options for audiological testing, care and treatment. The app also gives users access to the resource, service, and provider directory, supporting location-and-type-driven search and browsing. In addition, the app furthermore provides a convenient place for new parents to capture, store, and organize provider information and notes regarding their children’s testing and case history/progress.
After state acceptance of the initial MVP rendition of the software solution, we added additional functional enhancements and extensions to release the app for both the Android and iOS platforms.
