Canopy Health Speeds Up App Development by 70% with Progress

Canopy Health, an accountable care organization, is dedicated to providing a better quality of healthcare to people residing in the Bay Area. With a large network of physicians and providers, Canopy Health puts a special emphasis on making care more accessible, transparent and affordable for all members.

As a patient-centric provider, Canopy Health wanted to focus on providing a better healthcare experience that simplified many of the complexities surrounding the process. It quickly became apparent that one of the best ways of doing this was by creating a streamlined digital experience across mobile and desktop platforms that was not only patient-friendly but also high impact.

To create this new digital ecosystem, Canopy Health realized that with people increasingly using mobile devices to take care of daily tasks, their new strategy would have to be developed with a “mobile first” mindset.

However, tackling the expansive mobile landscape is a hurdle that has tripped up many healthcare organizations in the past due to its complexity. The challenge is two-fold:

1. Developing mobile apps is difficult due to the sheer number of different operating systems and platform specifications. Building an application with a good user experience across all of these platforms requires a lot of time and energy.
2. Even once the application has been developed, maintaining an application across multiple platforms is still difficult and cumbersome.

After exploring a number of different options, Canopy Health decided on Progress, an enterprise health cloud solution powered by Progress Kinvey™. Originally, Progress Health Cloud was used to develop Canopy Health’s web-based “Find a Doctor” application, but after realizing its strengths in the mobile development space, the solution became the heart of Canopy Health’s digital strategy.

“We were trying to find an mBaaS platform that would help us accelerate and standardize development across all of these different architectures,” explained Pamela Hudson, Chief Information Officer, Canopy Health. “After doing our research, Progress was the most reliable and mature platform. We also liked that Progress had a short-term and long-term vision for the healthcare space.”

Canopy Health’s digital strategy could essentially be broken down into three critical signature moves, all of which leveraged Progress Health Cloud:

• A public website, for which Progress Health Cloud provides the provider and service ancillary directory
• A suite of mobile applications, which are built on the Progress Health Cloud framework and use the adapters to connect to Salesforce Identity, IBM Initiate and other services
• A member portal, which uses the same architecture for Progress

Since transitioning to Progress Health Cloud, Canopy Health has been able to improve development times significantly when compared to the industry average—the firm can develop hefty feature functions in as few as six weeks. Additionally, the developers can make any urgent tweaks and adjustments to data as needed, which helps them be more agile.

“If you look at the tools and documentation, you can see how Progress Health Cloud has been developed and designed specifically for developers to accelerate development and maintenance,” said Hudson.

Between initial development costs and application maintenance, Canopy Health estimates a cost savings of 70% using the platform. At the same time, Canopy has also sped up development from approximately 18-20 weeks using a traditional Waterfall approach to six weeks with Progress.

Canopy Health found value in the service received from the Progress team as well. For example, when Canopy Health encountered some challenges with its identity access management solution, Progress created a proof-of-concept free of charge to help Canopy Health get through the issue.

“My experience with Progress Health Cloud has only been positive. When we’ve had issues and bugs, the account management team has taken our escalations to heart and turned them around on a dime,” said Cathy Farmer, Program Manager for Digital Strategy and Implementation, Canopy Health.

Most importantly, users have been very positive on the new applications and tools developed on the Progress Health Cloud platform. They really enjoy the user experience as well as how easy the tools are to use—especially the provider directory tool. This is critical, since consumer expectations are constantly on the rise when it comes to mobile experiences.

For Canopy Health, this is only the beginning. Canopy Health is dedicated to its mission of making healthcare as easy as possible for patients. With a goal of building its network up from its current 15,000 members to 250,000+ members, Canopy will need to provide the best digital healthcare experience in the Bay Area and Progress Health Cloud is a big part of that.