Boston Heart Diagnostics Digitally Transforms the Patient Experience with Progress

Through a novel combination of integrated diagnostics, personalized reporting and lifestyle management, Boston Heart Diagnostics has been improving patient outcomes since 2007. That success is dependent on providing a superior user experience to its diverse end user community with widely varying computer skills and expertise.

Boston Heart realized that application adoption depended on a number of factors, most importantly, an easy-to-use and intuitive end user experience on any device from desktop to tablet and mobile. That’s where the organization turned to Progress.

When Boston Heart set out to build its wellness portal, a key component was UI. After evaluating a number of development tools, it concluded that Progress® Kendo UI® offered the most features and functionality to create the exceptional end user experience essential to adoption. At the same time Boston Heart concluded that Telerik® DevCraft™ was the ideal toolset to speed development and increase productivity at the backend.

“It (Kendo UI) allows the user to interact dynamically, whether it’s on the desktop or a mobile device—and it allows them to readily communicate, respond and take appropriate action,” said Shalom Keynan, Director of Application Development for Boston Heart. “I find Kendo UI very useful and robust. The sliders, grid lists, calendars and many other widgets help our developers rapidly build user-friendly functionality into the system.”

Boston Heart was also seeking to create a more deeply personalized solution to keep patients engaged. It needed a business rules solution to help build customizable patient reports based on lab test results and nutrition, lifestyle and behavioral data.

“Progress® Corticon® allows our scientific team to author rules and our development team to use and consume them inside our application,” Keynan said. “We don’t need to have developers involved in writing rules.”

Today, the entire Boston Heart community of patients, providers and dietitians enjoy a state-of-the-art portal that promotes the free flow of information to positively impact patient outcomes. From a development standpoint, Progress allows Boston Heart to bring new functionality to market—fast.

“From a time to market perspective, Progress helps us speed the development process by at least 40 percent,” Keynan said. “It allows us to control the overall solution and create the very best rich user experience. It is the best solution out there. We look at Progress not just as a platform or utilities, but as a partner for successful development.”

An integral component of a successful partnership is customer support. “We found that the documentation, the community and tech support gave us helpful answers to whatever questions we had. We know we can leverage the relationship and keep building better and better applications,” Keynan said.

“With the Progress platform we have the opportunity to build truly great digital experiences that can directly affect patient behavior,” Keynan concluded. “All the pieces are in place for us to move the bar higher to motivate people to improve their health through evidence-based information presented where they want it, when they want it and on any device they may be using.”