Eliminating the hassle and simplifying the process of buying prescription medications.
DrFirst, a pioneer in healthcare technology solutions, unites every touchpoint of care and helps close the gaps between information and people to improve patient outcomes. Their goal to, “Unite The Healthiverse™”, aims to create an interconnected healthcare space where information silos are shattered and stakeholders aspire to improve patient care.
With the goal to continue delivering revolutionary healthcare solutions, DrFirst partnered with InfoMagnus to develop a cloud-based mobile application product called GetMyRx. By eliminating the hassle and simplifying the process, the first-of-its-kind application helps people order prescriptions, confirm co-pays up front, and experience same-day delivery of medications at no extra cost.
GetMyRx is also the first app to support new or existing, paper or electronic prescriptions. Users can place a first-time order in about a minute. The app matches the user’s location with a nearby pharmacy to fill and deliver the prescription after confirming the user’s copayment information in advance.
The migration to AWS cloud services has been pivotal insupporting GetMyRx's expansive network that now spans 35 states, hundreds ofpharmacies, and a dedicated user base. This strategic move ensures agility andscalability for future business growth.
The Business Challenge: Tackling Prescription Non-adherence
Prescription non adherence – a term used to describe when patients fail to fill a prescription given by their primary care physician – is a common problem in the healthcare industry.
In fact, according to a Harvard University study of nearly 280,000 patients found that every one in three adults who receive a prescription never make it to the pharmacy, citing “hassle” and “procrastination” as top reasons. The New England Healthcare Institute, a nonprofit health organization, estimates that poor medication adherence by patients results in nearly $290 billion per year in avoidable medical spending.
President of Consumer Solutions at DrFirst, Luis Angel, knew there was a better way to help both patients and pharmacies manage and deliver prescriptions. Together with InfoMagnus, Angel, was able to make significant upgrades to both the patient and pharmacy applications and relaunch the GetMyRx platform in 2015. The easy-to-use application, today, facilitates the delivery of medications to consumers to more than 3,000 zip codes across the U.S.
Speeding up Success with AWS: InfoMagnus and Seamless Communication.
The GetMyRx application works by scanning a user’s prescription and insurance card. Next, it detects and routes the prescription information to the closest in-network pharmacy. Subsequently, the pharmacy uses the platform to confirm and send drug copay confirmations to the patient’s phone, while also using push notifications to send refill reminders before a prescription expires and engage in two-way text communications with patients when needed.
In order for the two applications to succeed and communicate seamlessly, InfoMagnus relied on AWS services to accelerate the build and provide the necessary functionalities for future growth. The cloud-based mobile application needed to provide a high level of security to serve both customers and pharmacies respectively, while performing numerous data-driven and mobile-friendly tasks.
To make sure the approach and the objectives met the scope of the project, InfoMagnus assembled a team of technologists with the experience and knowledge to deliver next-generation technologies including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure, resizable compute capacity and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to operate and scale in the cloud.
Accelerating Growth with DrFirst: A New Build, Refreshed UI and Innovative Features.
DrFirst was looking to expedite delivery of these new features to its platform to foster rapid expansion across the United States. This included a completely new build of the pharmacy-facing application, delivering a refresh of the user interface and several innovative features to make it more agile.
To begin, the team developed a sophisticated component architecture based on Helios – a custom component framework – that delivers a robust and scalable architecture for mobile applications with data that changes repeatedly over time.
This distributed application architecture included Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for fully managed message queuing as well as Amazon DynamoDB to provide serverless, key-value NoSQL database functionality, while also deploying a private cloud infrastructure to offer more control and greater security.
The user interface is based on Angular 5 using Google’s AMP technology. InfoMagnus also enriched the functionality of the backend API and developed a new mobile application for iOS and Android operating systems.
Uniting For Success: DrFirst and InfoMagnus Deliver Hourly Transactions in a Highly Scaled Private Cloud Platform.
Together with the DrFirst development team, InfoMagnus was able to deliver a highly scaled, private cloud platform where thousands of transactions take place on an hourly basis. The migration to AWS cloud services was a pivotal move that achieved unprecedented scalability and agility. This transition also entailed a comprehensive overhaul of the pharmacy-facing application. The revamp introduced a refreshed user interface and several new features, enhancing both agility and user-friendliness. Since the projects initial engagement, InfoMagnus continues to be DrFirst’s lead technology partner delivering value and development support.
Today, the nation’s leading on-demand pharmacy platform has partnered with hundreds of leading independent pharmacies offering service in more than 3,000 zip codes across 35 states.