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A group of medical professionals envisioned an online portal where visitors can ask medical questions and have them answered by medical staff or browse a library of previously answered questions. The main goal was to go far beyond the typical Q&A website, by ensuring the quality and completeness of the answers. Another goal was to make sure the service is accessible to anyone in need, including those who can not afford traditional medical assistance such as doctor visits. And so, the portal was titled PennyDoc and Intechnic was entrusted to help plan and to develop this portal.
After several brainstorming sessions, it was determined that the most appropriate course was to create the portal in two phases, releasing a functioning website after the first, then expanding functionality in the second. At the completion of the initial phase, a patient would be able to submit new questions, have them answered by one doctor, then have that answer reviewed by another – in order to ensure completeness and correctness. The second phase would bring enhancements that would enable to portal to generate revenue for its owners. This would include modules for billing, revenue sharing, and content-relevant advertising.
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Intechnic started by detailing all PennyDoc features to be included in the first release then designing the flow of core processes that would have to be supported by the website: patients registering and asking questions; doctors being assigned to a case; doctors answering and verifying questions; communication between doctors, patients, and portal administrators; and others. The challenge was to ensure that patient privacy was maintained, administrator input minimized, and answer quality consistently maintained, all the while keeping the portal as simple to use as possible for all parties. Once the processes were defined, graphical interfaces were produced; these included screens for Asking and Answering, rating and review elements, Doctors’ and Patients’ portal sections, Administrative Console sections, etc. Subsequently, all functionality was coded, tested at high and low levels, and released for beta testing. This initial release included not only the features necessary to ask, answer, view, rate and review, categorize, browse, tag, and search medical questions, but also included invitation tracking, automated email notifications, doctor registration, and several other “nice to have” features planned for the second phase.
As the beta test continues, Intechnic is working hard, designing many new features that will improve the visitor experience, expand the scope of application, facilitate a viral marketing strategy and ensure that PennyDoc generates ample profits for its founders.