CLIENT GOALS
Doctors have no visibility into their effectiveness metrics. They have encounters with patients which translate into relative value units (RVUs) depending on factors such as duration and difficulty. Those are converted into salary, but it is all done outside the view of the doctor.
Our client had a direct experience with this. Management told his team their performance was down and that they would cut pay if it didn’t improve. But the team knew it was doing well and so they painstakingly evaluated their data, manually, over several months. They uncovered the real problem—an inaccurate, behind-the-scenes calculation.
RVUx aims to fix problems like this. And to put Doctors’ efficiency metrics directly into their own hands. The goal is to be a simple and quick mobile app that allows doctors to record their work contributions. The recorded data is then available for reporting and analysis.
To build out the entire business, the client needed funding from investors, and an MVP to take to them to demonstrate the opportunity. Since he was self-funding this project he needed that quickly and affordably.
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
The RVUx MVP is a React Native mobile application that allows authenticated doctors to record their work quickly and easily. It has built-in calculations to translate the individual activities (i.e. encounters with patients) into the RVU metric which is used by hospitals and insurance companies to determine doctor compensation. The app is deployed over the Expo framework to allow for quick beta testing and demonstrations.
EXPO DEVELOPMENT
PROJECT HIGHLIGHT
Due to the project timeline, there wasn’t an opportunity to go through the lengthy approval processes of the Apple app store or the Google play store. Instead, our team leveraged the Expo framework, which includes an Android and iPhone app that “hosts” development apps so that they can be opened on end-user devices. This readied the project for use by the client and beta users (on both Android and iOS) within days instead of weeks.
Using React Native with Expo (vs. a no-code platform such as Bubble.io) allowed us to create a fully functional app—it didn’t need to be thrown away after the MVP. All work done at this stage will be incorporated into the first production version of the RVUx app.
RVUX SUMMARY GRAPH
PROJECT HIGHLIGHT
Imperative to RVUx’s value is the ability for doctors to analyze past work and trends. The long-term vision is to have a companion, full-screen web application with interactive charts and displays that allow doctors to see data and trends.
For the MVP, we needed to include a small graph showing RVUs and total encounters per day. However, since the new user accounts were starting fresh, it took a lot of time and manual entry to populate the data to be able to see the effectiveness of the graph. To solve this problem we added some development-only features such as the ability to generate random data for past performance which populates the summary graph.
CONCLUSION
While under an abbreviated timeline, Mountain Dev was able to deeply understand the client needs to identify a solution. We were able to chose an ideal technology to meet the product requirments. This allowed us to overcome traditional app-release-schedule issues and launch an MVP to the client and beta users quickly.
The team is excited to implement similar projects in the future!
