Developing Applications To Automate Medical Trials
The following Article contains my experience working in Triomics Healthcare to develop Android And IOS applications for their Automation ecosystem to assist in medical Trials.
About Triomics
Every medicine before releasing in the public domain needs to undergo numerous medical trials to ensure its safety and study any effects on different people. The average cost to launch a medicine is 1.3 billion dollars which eventually adds up to the final price. Triomics offers pharmaceutical companies an ecosystem to automate this workflow and assist these companies which results in significantly lowering this cost.
What I worked on
During my internship, I worked on the Patient Diary app made for mobile phones and the DDC app made for Tablets. Both apps were made using the flutter framework which enabled us to deploy them on both IOS and Android operating systems.
Triomics Direct Data Capture application was made to help doctors manage the medical trials, and patients and have an overlook of the entire stats on a single application. Through the application, doctors can enrol new participants in a study, manage them, schedule their visits, make self-assessment forms, etc. DDC application also gives the user the access to Patient Diary application resulting in a whole patient-doctor ecosystem.
Triomics Patient Diary application is currently offered to our patients via Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The patient Diary app is used by patients to stay in constant touch with doctors, perform self-assessment tests, fill questionnaires provided by the doctor, report any distress or schedule a visit. App access can only be provided if the doctor wants and can be enabled by entering an OTP given to the patient by the respective doctor.
Challenges And Learnings
While working on the Patient Diary application, we stumbled upon a situation where we had to detect whether the given OTP is correct or not for a particular patient. To do this we needed to poll an API to detect any possible changes and stop/start the polling service as per screen navigation. Also the content on the screen needed to be changed dynamically as the OTP is accepted. To implement this, we used Provider State management to detect any changes on the API and communicate with the widgets to show relative content dynamically. Moreover, we improved the whole onboarding and login process and implemented multi-language support in the same.
DDC application was made from scratch and needed to showcase graphs on the dashboard where the content had to be rendered from the API. Moreover, we also implemented functionality which can render dynamic UI elements to generate a form to be sent out to patients.
Upon working on both the projects, I learned about now dynamic UI rendering works and how big data is received by API. I also learned about swagger and other tools to handle API calls. I also learned about provider to handle my app state and other techniques to optimise my code.
My Biggest Impact
The biggest impact I made during my internship was to help Triomics to determine which framework to use for future app development.
We had a choice between React native and flutter leading to which i performed critical analysis on both the frameworks and recommended them to use flutter by making a presentation and presenting it to CTO and other stake holders. Hence it is my biggest impact because the decision to choose flutter over react native would stick with the company for a long time.
Conclusion
Triomics possessed one of the best working environments I have ever experienced in an organization. All of my seniors were super friendly and taught me soft skills along with technical skills which made my industry ready and capable to work in a fast-paced collaborative environment.
Tech skills I learned would help me to develop apps in a more optimized way than ever and the techniques I learned would stick with me throughout my career.
