Boston Heart Diagnostics

Since 2007, Boston Heart Diagnostics has been improving heart health and preventing disease through a novel combination of integrated diagnostics, personalized reporting and lifestyle management. By combining these elements, Boston Heart is advancing the way providers and patients communicate to improve overall health. To promote this free flow of information, the organization is continuously evaluating technology solutions to ensure an optimal user experience.

“Our users are primarily healthcare providers, patients and registered dietitians,” explained Shalom Keynan, Director of Application Development, Boston Heart Diagnostics. “Our goal is to create an ecosystem where relevant and usable information from multiple sources is presented to patients in a way that helps them make better decisions and take positive actions that promote a healthier lifestyle.”

With a diverse end user community with widely varying computer skills and expertise, application adoption depends 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 a reliance on Progress came into play.

When Boston Heart set out to build its unique system that combines medical diagnostics with personalized nutrition plans and lifestyle programs, a key component was UI. After evaluating a number of development tools, it concluded Telerik® Kendo UI® by Progress offered the most features and functionality to create the exceptional end user experience essential to adoption. Keynan also concluded Telerik DevCraft™ was the ideal toolset to speed development and increase productivity at the backend.

“One of the things that Progress delivers with Kendo UI, more than any other component out there, is an interesting user experience,” Keynan said. “It 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.”

Boston Heart relied on a number of Kendo UI widgets, including Kendo UI Scheduler, a critical component to manage complex patient appointment schedules. In addition, Kendo UI Grids allowed Boston Heart to create tools for providers to manage patient information, testing and reporting.

“I find Kendo UI very useful and robust,” Keynan said. “The sliders, grid lists, calendars and many other widgets help our developers rapidly build user friendly functionality into the system.”

To further enhance the user experience, Boston Heart sought to create a more deeply personalized solution to ensure patients stay engaged and informed about their health. It needed a business rules engine for decision processing to help build personalized, customizable patient reports based on lab test results and nutrition, lifestyle and behavioral data to arm patients with usable, actionable information.

“We looked at multiple rules engines and found Progress® Corticon® was at the top of the list,” Keynan said. “It was easy to use and easy to author rules. In a simple and very useful studio, authors see the reports as they write them, communicate with databases and get rules launched and processed, producing results upfront before they are deployed in production.

The segregation between rule authoring and rule development was a critical feature for Boston Heart. “Corticon allows our scientific team to author rules and our development team to use them and consume them inside our applications. We don’t need to have developers involved in writing rules,” Keynan said.

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 development platform we have the opportunity to create a truly great digital experience 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.”