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.
To learn more about the Alternova, we conducted an interview with Maria Clara Mesa, Chief Growth Officer of Alternova.
1. Did the COVID-19 pandemic have any impacts on the need for digital health solutions? Can you elaborate on that?
It definitely had a big impact. It made evident to the world the need to scale and democratize access to healthcare, it was clear before, but now no one can deny it.
Also, and more than anything else, the rise of Digital Health beautifully evidences how technology is not a shiny object, it is a means to a greater end, which in this case is tackling a healthcare need and empowering patients.
2. How is digital health transforming patient experience?
It is giving patients access to health services and access to education and resources to hack their health. And more importantly, it is making the industry design healthcare experiences centering on the patient, making things easier and more enjoyable (creating a customer experience, which in healthcare is not a thing and we all struggle with it).
3. Can you tell us more about Alternova?
Alternova is a software development company that specializes in Digital Health because we believe in the power and the responsibility technology has to positively transform the human experience.
Alternova is composed of a diverse team of UX designers, video game designers, app developers, infrastructure engineers and data scientists that want to build fun products with positive impact. We offer our clients software development services so they don’t have to worry about building compliant products and so they can concentrate on making them successful and growing their business and their impact.
We work with institutions like Sttanford, UCSF, Takeda and Childrens National and also with a varied pool of Digital Health startups from their early stages.
Type of products (use case) we can build: digital therapeutics, patient monitoring apps, educational apps, platform to collect and store healthcare data (including RCT platforms).
4. What kinds of digital health solutions does Alternova provide?
We provide software development services to our clients: app development (web & mobile), video game development, VR development, infrastructure development, DevOps engineering and data science.
Basically, our expertise is described as: we are very good at developing different types of interactive interfaces to collect RWD. That means we can build digital therapeutic, companion apps, patient monitoring apps and platforms and many sorts of data integration solutions.
5. What kinds of organizations and companies do you work with?
We work with many research centers (UCSF, MIT, Stanford, UCSD, etc), pharmaceutical companies, healthcare accelerators and digital health startups from their early stages.
6. What makes you standout apart from other competitors?
– We come from a video game background, so we bring our outside of the box knowledge in engaging mechanics that boost adoption and retention in the products we build.
– We know how to build and document compliant software.
– We help our clients figure out what is the most cost effective solution to solve their business problems using technology (we are not request takers, we act as consultants and build software that actually solves a real problem).
– We care about the purpose of our clients’ products, and we build real human relationships with them that enhance and accelerate the development process.
– We are an american company that operates from Latam, so we can be totally accessible for an early stage startup.
– We’ve built an open source framework for digital health innovators to build their products faster and cheaper called CardinalKit so they don’t have to start from scratch.
7. What is the CardinalKit platform?
CardinalKit is an open source framework composed of a template mobile app and a web dashboard. The intent behind these tools is to democratize digital health development and innovation.
CardinalKit collects mobile and wearable healthcare data and transforms it into Open Mhealth and FHIR standards so it is ready for analytics and for interoperability. It is an open-source framework to accelerate development and research in Digital Health by reducing the time and the budget needed to build a compliant back-end infrastructure to collect and process healthcare data. Website. Pre-recorded webinar.
8. How can the CardinalKit platform benefit digital health innovators?
– By simplifying their data collection process, either for validation, enhancement or insight generation for users.
9. Where do you see Alternova in the coming 5-years?
I see Alternova becoming the go to software development company in the Digital Health industry.
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