Pioneering Innovation in Pharmaceutical Research and Development

Solutions

To address Novartis’ objectives with Inizio MEDiSTRAVA, we developed tailored strategies to meet each goal. However, our strategy revolved around a single solution that could be repurposed with minimal change to achieve each primary goal with as few resources as necessary.

Exceptional Development Velocity Through Close Collaboration

Our team met with stakeholders early on to accurately identify the requirements. This effort led us to deliver the product correctly the first time and avoided unnecessary and expensive rewrites. This optimized Novartis' utilization of our team, leading to an expedient and cost-efficient result that exceeded expectations.

Through discovery, our team identified the following requirements:

1. A web version accessible from the Novartis website for medical professionals and consumers alike.
2. A mobile version optimized for low connectivity zones that sales representatives could take with them on the go.
3. A desktop version adapted for touchscreens to help enhance engagement at congresses.

To limit the costs of maintaining three products, our team explored and selected technologies that allowed the platform to be deployed to all three targets with maximum reuse of the underlying code for each experience. The existing product was built utilizing Angular, a popular web framework, which we combined with Nx, a popular monorepo technology with first-class Angular support, to enable code-sharing for the common functionality. Apache Cordova was used to build the application for iOS and Android platforms, and Electron was used to build the application for universal desktop usage.

Making these intentional choices to the solution enabled the team to deliver performant solutions that achieved the project goals without exceeding budgetary and time constraints.

Revolutionize Pipeline Visualization

The key deliverable was innovating and simplifying how clinical trial data was presented to the consumer and making it accessible on each platform. We focused on making the visual data pipeline more accessible and user-friendly for medical professionals and the general public. Each trial had information packages in an existing proprietary content management system (CMS) containing details such as text, images, and video content that needed to be presented to the end user.

We began by building the web application and focused on offering intuitive navigation and digestible visualizations of the clinical trial data. While building, the team identified key modules and abstractions that could be made to enable the mobile and desktop platforms, including features like offline support, data caching, and interactive elements. These intentional abstractions and forward thinking made the creation of mobile and desktop platforms trivial, allowing the team to seamlessly share features across each platform, removing extraneous effort in incorporating features into each application and yielding maximum output for each new feature.

Elevate Congress Presence

The desktop application was intended to enhance the attendees' table experience at congresses by providing an interactive demonstration, allowing them to engage with and improve conversations. We built a touch-screen-supported version that allows attendees to interact with a screen at Novartis' congress booth. Given some of the challenges of a congress venue's internet connectivity, we also needed to leverage the same functionality we built for the mobile application. Electron's toolkit and our abstractions facilitated the quick implementation of touch support on our existing interfaces while leveraging existing functionality from the other platforms.