Highlights

• Suitable for several platforms 
• In-app questionnaire
• Easy integration with third-party services
• Can be integrated with LDAP, SAML

Challenge

In the light of COVID-19 pandemic, SoftTeco and Kandasoft have undertaken a project to develop software for managing patients’ visitors across hospitals in the United States. The main idea was to prevent the spread of the disease among patients and employees of healthcare establishments by timely identifying symptoms among visitors.

We had to develop a system that would allow immediate assessment of a visitor’s state and would also allow keeping records of all the visits that occurred.

Solution

VisitorAccess is an easy yet efficient system for monitoring all visits to patients and keeping records of them. The system can be used by hospital security personnel and/or administrators and helps them detect whether a visitor has any of the warning symptoms that would prevent them from a visit.

The solution has an in-built questionnaire for the visitors. Based on the answers, the hospital’s personnel either grants the permission for a visit or declines it. The procedure of checking visitors includes the following steps: asking for the patient’s name and floor and then asking the visitor to go through the questionnaire. If the visitor is allowed to visit, the system will display the exact time of the visit and the person responsible for granting access.

How It Works

When a hospital security guard or an administrator launches the app, they see a dashboard with a list of patients in the medical facility. The user can search for the patient by name or by the floor where the patient stays. Upon finding the patient, a user can see whether the limit of people per hospital room is reached or whether a patient has another visitor. This allows to constantly manage the number of people currently being at the hospital and prevent overcrowding.

In order to mitigate the risk of disease spread, the visitor can be asked to fill out a questionary regarding their health condition and possible symptoms. The questions can be easily changed in accordance with the specific needs of a medical facility. Once the visitor answers the questions asked by the app’s user, the system will display the results and will either grant or decline a visit.

To ensure authentication security, the SoftTeco team integrated the application with the SAML protocol to minimize the risks of external and internal threats. While authentication through SAML is more user-friendly, it also provides better security for data stored within the app. The app’s security is enhanced further by having the database encrypted through the LDAP integration.

Because the application is intended for use by different establishments and in different countries, it has to be easily scaled to fit the needs of every client. We have achieved a high level of scalability due to the simplicity of the app’s architecture and the option to quickly change all the needed information (i.e. patients’ data, questions in the survey, etc.) in the backend. In order to tailor the app for the needs of an individual client in terms of UI, we used React and React Native.

Results

Together with Kandasoft, SoftTeco developed a user-friendly and efficient solution that is fully compliant with HIPPA and can be easily scaled and applied to any medical facility. We are glad that we can support the healthcare sector during the crisis and we will continue expanding the application’s functionality and providing further support and maintenance services.