This is part five in our Pega Community Hackathon profile series. In this series we profile 2021 Hackathon participants and ask them about their process for creating top-performing applications.
As an organization committed to helping the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) modernize its healthcare services for military veterans, innoVet Health brought a unique perspective to its first ever Pega Community Hackathon project.
innoVet Health’s team focuses on improving patient care processes.
“A few members of our team got COVID and unfortunately their post-discharge experience was a sequence of poor communication between the hospitals and primary care physicians,” explained Tony Mallia from innoVet Health.
“Those experiences served as our inspiration to solve these communication gaps and improve post-COVID outcomes for patients.”
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, over 203 million cases around the world have been confirmed according to statistics from the World Health Organization. COVID cases have overwhelmed hospitals and medical centers, creating a vicious cycle where outgoing patients often have little communication with doctors and nurses after being discharged.
When innoVet Health began the process of building their “COVID-19 ADT Notification and Case Management System” app, the team decided that using an Agile methodology would be worthwhile since it was the entire team’s first time using Pega technologies.
Over the course of six weeks, the innoVet health team went through a series of weekly sprints and received feedback from a group of business users to help inform their progress.
The result was a Pega application that won our Pega Novice Award at the 2021 Pega Community Hackathon.
The application allows hospitals to identify COVID-19 cases at the beginning of a patient’s admission and collaborate with a patient’s primary care provider (PCP) to track their status after they have been discharged.
Follow-up appointments can also be booked using the app’s scheduling functionality with either a PCP or medical staff at a hospital.
“Once we got up to speed with Pega’s low-code platform, our team was pleasantly surprised that the learning curve was not as steep as we anticipated,” concluded Mallia.
“Being able to create an MLP in six weeks gave us confidence that we can solve real-world problems with Pega technologies. The user feedback has been very promising so far and we think the solution could be deployed with one of our customers in the near future.”
You can find additional posts in the Pega Community Hackathon 2021 profile series below:
Recommended resources:
- Read more about our Community Hackathon here, or read our press release.
- To read more about innoVet Health's submission and view a demo, click here.
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