Digital HealthAlternova: Building Digital Experiences To Provide Better Care

Over the past decade, the healthcare industry has seen a clear shift with regards to the advancement of digital health technology; and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has only brought greater awareness to the immediate need for more digital health solutions.

What’s more, digital health is transforming the patient experience itself. For many patients, a doctor’s visit is often an unpleasant and nerve-racking experience. Digital health has provided more fun and effective ways for providers to keep their patients engaged.

At the very forefront of this digital health revolution is Alternova, a San-Francisco-based software company that specializes in building innovative applications and platforms for providers, researchers and patients alike.

What does Alternova do?

Simply put, Alternova builds digital tools—such as web and mobile applications, data platforms, and even video games—that can be used to not only assist healthcare providers and researchers but also help prevent, diagnose, monitor, and treat various health issues.

As a specialized software development company, Alternova describes itself as the first experiences-as-medicine factory. Their digital health solutions include VR experiences, video games for mental health, and different types of compliant platforms to collect healthcare data (RCT platforms, wearable data collection). Alternova’s specialty is the development of fun and interactive interfaces to collect real world data.

The company has worked hand-in-hand with top scientists all over the world and has partnered with MIT, UCSF, Stanford, Takeda, Childrens National and startups from early stages to help bring their digital health products to life.

The CardinalKit platform

Currently, the Alternova team is part of the core team maintaining CardinalKit—an open source platform that was created alongside the team at the Stanford Byers Center of Biodesign.

The purpose of this platform is to help digital health innovators collect, organize, and easily view data that is collected through their digital health applications, mobile devices, and wearables—all through a single interface.

Integration is simple. Thanks to the iOS framework’s low-code configuration and setup, digital health innovators can use the CardinalKit platform to accelerate product development and roll out working prototypes of their applications at a lower cost.

The implications of CardinalKit are significant, as this framework allows digital health tools to be developed and trialed at a much faster rate. Additionally, it gives healthcare providers and patients easier ways to access their data—allowing them to become more proactive rather than merely reactive to symptoms, issues, and concerns.

What’s next for Alternova?

Today, Alternova continues to develop digital health software for other startups, innovators, and healthcare providers. As a result, they are able to have an indirect impact on the digital health industry.

At the same time, the company is in the process of developing their own products that they hope will allow them to have an even greater and more direct impact on the digital health landscape at large.