How We Built a Timely, Bug-Free, Boundary-Braking PMS
Case study coauthored by Radu Tuteanu and Lavinia Codresi
Amplicare, a distinguished pharmacy management software developer, approached Vitamin with an exciting challenge — build a groundbreaking recommendation app for pharmacists to enhance the quality of care, engagement, and patient outcomes.
The collaboration with Vitamin propelled Amplicare into the chain pharmacy market. One of the most interesting things about this project is that at first, they thought it couldn’t be done.
About Amplicare
Amplicare, now merged into the Omnicell health tech giant, provides a decision-automation platform for PMS workflow management. Designed by pharmacists for pharmacists, their proprietary technology analyzes demographic and clinical data to provide the best offers, bridge care gaps, and identify engagement opportunities. But the situation was different when Amplicare first contacted us.
At the time, Amplicare was a startup that targeted independent pharmacies. Their CEO saw a growth opportunity — a system that would suggest vaccinations, medications, and treatments to patients that visited these pharmacies. It was time for the company to go multi-product, and the CEO knew how to make it work.
The Challenge of Integrating Old Pharmacy Systems
Amplicare’s CEO has a programming background, which helped him devise the idea — they would create an app that reads the patient’s file, draws out relevant information, and offers decision support to pharmacists in real-time. Doing so required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read the data as the users load it, no matter the resolution or template of the patient file, and a smart engine for search and analytics.
The in-house engineering team believed the new app couldn’t successfully integrate with the existing system due to its inherent complexities, and they wrote it off. As a result, Amplicare’s CEO looked outward for assistance.
Why Amplicare Chose Vitamin Software
Amplicare had a business need, and we found a way to achieve it through technology. We recognized the project would be complicated but didn’t consider it impossible. Instead, we examined the idea, developed a plan, and vouched to deliver a prototype within 45 days. Our readiness to take up the challenge made us stand out in Amplicare’s eyes.
How Vitamin Software Responded
To prove that Amplicare’s idea could become a reality, we quickly developed a prototype to test out the basic functionalities. It was a .NET desktop application based on Tesseract OCR, an engine that works across operating systems. Search and analytics relied on Elasticsearch, which we used for logs and configuration.
We knew we couldn’t immediately accomplish 100% accuracy, so we joined forces with the client’s Product Manager to set up success metrics instead. We installed the first version of the app in five pharmacies for testing purposes, using Elasticsearch to monitor and debug it. Upon going live, we followed a thorough triage and maintenance procedure to ensure an error-free customer-facing experience.
We performed over-the-air updates based on feedback and statistics. The platform was hosted on AWS so it could scale with the fast-growing user base and abided by the SOC2 standards to keep the pharmacies compliant.
The Results
The keys to our success were good planning, excellent communication, and genuine care for the end-user’s experience. Here’s what Amplicare’s CEO had to say after working with Vitamin:
The team from Vitamin gave our company a superpower. There was a game-changing project on our hands, but one that we never had the capacity for. Andrei and his team took this challenge and exceeded our expectations in delivering a truly great product experience for our customers that set up our business success in the years to come. Thank you!
Flaviu Simihaian — CEO, Amplicare
Ready to Turn Seemingly Impossible Ideas Into Reality?
We at Vitamin Software love a challenge, so connect with us to discuss your game-changing healthcare SaaS idea. As always, we’ll begin with a Vitamin Sanity Check to see whether it’s viable and capital-efficient — and devise an alternative suggestion if it fails the test.