React.js Consulting Enhances Medical Claims Processing Application

Challenge

A medical claim processing company looking to establish a digital presence for the first time had hired an outside agency to complete initial development on a mobile app that would allow customers to view claims and make payments.

The client, which historically provided all customer support over the phone, needed the app to be optimized for both iOS and Android while adhering to strict HIPAA regulations. Ultimately, the client hoped the app would deliver a better customer experience and drive new revenue streams while freeing up time and resources previously dedicated to providing the manual support.

After the outside agency completed initial development, the client engaged WWT to audit the application, which was written in React.js (a JavaScript library for building user interfaces).

An auditor from WWT's Application Services' group quickly found gaps in the agency's work and immediate opportunities for improvement. WWT provided the client with a React.js consultant to address identified issues.

Our approach

The WWT consultant realized the client's development team, which was made up of all back-end C# developers with no mobile development experience, needed React.js training for the application to succeed.  

In addition to providing React.js training to the client's developers, the consultant initiated several improvements to the development environment setup by: 

• Setting up a multi-developer capability as the client's existing environment was not set up to allow multiple developers to work on one project together.
• Writing code to help data flow more efficiently and mentoring the client's developers on why that was important and how to do it.
• Introducing software tools that made the client's developers more efficient, allowing them to create consistency in style by helping the client define and implement their own development style.
• Reducing run time errors by introducing the use of TypeScript and helping them understand how to refactor code. By refactoring the code, the client was able to reduce the size of some components that were way too large and helped developers split up those components to improve performance and gain maintainability.
• Removing unused dependencies to help improve performance of the application and removed unnecessarily complex code without changing any of the functionality of the application.

The original application was not designed to handle multiple screen sizes, so the WWT consultant helped the client refactor its code to make it work with the different devices that the client's end customers would likely use.

The client's team was not used to incorporating quality assurance into their work stream, so the WWT consultant trained the client's developers to fix testing issues they were encountering. The consultant worked side by side with the team and trained them how to fix many of the unit tests and integration tests that had not been implemented correctly. 

Finally, the WWT consultant helped the client upgrade their version of React.js to reduce security vulnerabilities — the client's application would be receiving HIPAA information for medical claims, and the consultant realized that HIPAA-compliant security practices had not been implemented. The consultant worked with the client to engage a WWT security expert to build encryption capability into the application and make it HIPAA compliant.

Results

Starting with the initial engagement to perform an audit on the application, WWT was able to work with our client to help the client bring to market a more secure and compatible claims-processing app, which is driving improved customer experience and helping the client generate new revenue moving forward. 

Further, WWT provided critical training to the client's developers so they can maintain and enhance their application to rollout new features or software updates while ensuring the necessary security is in place.