Healthcare Communication Center (HCC)

Timely and targeted communication is a growing demand for businesses of all types. It's especially relevant in the healthcare industry as more and more providers are embracing technology across all stages of the patient journey. VPS' partners at Twilio are at the forefront of this movement, having developed their SMS messaging platform, among other key components, to be HIPAA-compliant in order to serve this use case. One thing that is missing is a user-focused application that providers can use to manage and conduct secure and private patient communication activities. Twilio enables the communication, but we need to provide the app. Appian makes a lot of sense to fill this role. With HIPAA-compliant AppianCloud hosting and features of the platform such as object level security, mobile app support, and seamless integrations, VPS wanted to deliver a powerful application platform that is ready for real world use in this challenging industry.

The process of building the application started with identifying the parts of the Twilio API that were considered HIPAA compliant. For example, it was clear we could utilize SMS messaging API and the Conversations API, but the TaskRouter API was off-limits. This meant we had to make a design decision to allow Appian to own the task assignment functionality. 

The second major task was to design the realtime chat agent interface. We couldn‚Äôt quite replicate a real-time experience with out-of-the-box SAIL, and the existing Appian Twilio Component plugin doesn't meet the HIPAA compliance standard. However, we were able to leverage the Custom SAIL Component SDK and Connected System SDK to build an Appian Plugin that would present that part of the UI using dynamic JavaScript. The connected system plugin we built utilizes the Twilio Conversations SDK to bridge patient messages coming in as SMS Text, with Agent messages being sent as chat.  

Once we had the solutions to these problems identified, we were able to build the application using an iterative Agile approach over the course of about 7 weeks. We developed the custom plugins and the Appian interfaces in parallel and integrated them as we went along, iterating the design as we went. 

One design goal was to ensure the Agent/Doctor's Office experience was mobile friendly. We tested and iterated the UI with mobile-friendly, responsive design in mind throughout the entire development process. 

One important accomplishment was to ensure we were maintaining the principles of HIPAA-compliance along the way. It's not enough to just say you're compliant just because the platforms being used support it. We had to be mindful of design patterns such as least-privilege and action auditing from the start, incorporating it into all designs from the beginning.