Boston Scientific’s healthcare solutions and partnerships (HS&P) team develops flexible, data-driven solutions with leading healthcare institutions to improve patient care while lowering costs. To facilitate fast, iterative innovation Boston Scientific came to OutSystems and delivery partner Devoteam.
Their first product, Clearpath, is like a SatNav for multidisciplinary hospital teams. It supports patients’ clinical history review, care, and monitoring through complex pathways, including specific heart procedures, implants, and soon, cancer treatments.
Boston Scientific is a worldwide provider of medical devices and innovative medical solutions that improve the health of patients around the world. Established in 1979, the company has over 36,000 employees and around 10 billion USD in revenue.
“Agility and trust were the two things front of mind when we chose OutSystems. It provides the speed needed to maximize agile, iterative development and the security best practices to keep clinical data safe. We were also impressed by the breadth and expertise of the OutSystems partner network, and we’re delighted with our partnership with Devoteam.”
Cristian Toader joined the company’s Healthcare Solutions & Partnerships team in 2017 as a digital solutions manager. The HS&P team invents and brings to market innovative healthcare solutions that address unmet patient needs and reduce the cost of healthcare. Such innovation is highly collaborative, working in long-term partnerships with customers to develop solutions that are differentiated and tailored to their needs. As is evident from Cristian’s job title, such solutions increasingly rely on digital technology.
Working with a hospital client, the HS&P advisory team identified a recurring problem. Physicians failed to review up to 90 percent of patients that may have benefited from a heart procedure called “LAAC” (Left Atrial Appendage Closure). It took too long for physicians to review the clinical history of patients leading to repeated readmissions. To help physicians improve patient care and outcomes, the HS&P team had two hypotheses to test.
Speed-up development and improve agility
Enterprise-grade scalability and security
Deliver customer-facing apps1. Could an algorithm use patient data—including history, diagnostic results, procedures, appointments, and observations—to automatically flag patients that might need the LAAC treatment for physician review?
2. Was it possible to streamline the tasks, communications, and collaboration needed for a multidisciplinary physician team to diagnose and treat patients?
Previous digital experiments had suffered from slow and hard-to-change coding and restrictions from third-party, white-labeled software. Cristian sought a more agile approach, and a colleague suggested he investigate OutSystems.
Having researched the low-code market and experimented with a free OutSystems personal environment for a few days, Cristian could see the potential that OutSystems could provide. But he wanted experienced developers to work alongside him to accelerate the experiment.
OutSystems introduced Devoteam, a local OutSystems delivery partner. Following a proof of concept—which has since evolved into a productive diagnostic scoring app—Boston Scientific became an OutSystems client in December 2019.
Through 2020, a project team of five HS&P staff with Cristian as Product Owner and two/occasionally three developers from Devoteam built a demonstratable MVP of Clearpath.
"One of the crucial design considerations for Clearpath is configurable multitenancy. We can securely deploy solutions for different hospitals, quickly integrate different hospital systems, and configure algorithms and workflows to address different therapies."
Key aspects of the development include:
Iterative development continued with regular demonstrations to customers and potential users to refine the solution. “During development, we became more and more confident that we could apply Clearpath to a wide variety of therapies,” explains Cristian.
A SatNav is a concise and visual analogy for benefits that Clearpath delivers to hospital teams. Many patient conditions are complex and difficult to diagnose. And even then, it’s challenging for healthcare teams to manage the patient’s journey safely and efficiently through a long and complex clinical pathway.
Like a SatNav, Clearpath guides that journey, helping multidisciplinary teams of doctors, nurses, and clinical technicians collaborate more quickly, cost-efficiently, and safely at every step.
Clearpath collects all information, tasks, and communication around the patient’s case record. And the status and next step are easy to see throughout the workflow. With Clearpath, physicians can escape the manual effort and delays caused by emails.
At Devoteam, we deliver innovative technology consulting for business. As a pure player of Digital Transformation for leading organisations across EMEA, our 8,000 professionals are dedicated to...
Learn more about DevoteamFeedback from hospital trials shows that Clearpath is on track to be an astounding success, as the following survey results illustrate:
4.8
Clearpath improves care coordination between our multidisciplinary teams
4.5
Clearpath saves time spent on patient analysis and triage
5.0
Clearpath is easy to use
4.8
Clearpath presents me with information that I trust
A crucial aspect of Clearpath’s success is the ability of the HS&P team to quickly configure and integrate the solution for different hospitals and therapies. In addition to the original LAAC solution, Boston Scientific has deployed Clearpath to support cardiac defibrillator implants, deep brain stimulation implants, deep vein thrombosis, and interventional oncology.
As the product moves into scaled deployment, Boston Scientific will explore many other therapeutical uses for Clearpath.
