A System to Deliver Eye Diagnostics Results in Minutes Instead of Weeks

Description

A provider of medical software solutions turned to Altoros to develop a cloud-based system for collaboration between opticians in stores and ophthalmologists in clinics.

Brief results of the collaboration:

• The company built a platform that enables remote collaboration between opticians in stores and ophthalmologists in clinics, transfering eye diagnostics from clinics to optical stores. This provides the possibility to test the eyesight and get timely care within just 15 minutes instead of waiting for weeks to just get an appointment.
• With the delivered system, the customer partnered with the two largest Norwegian chains of optics, onboarding 40% of opticians in the country for counseling facilitation.
• The estimations by the startup claim that the platform has the potential to reduce social expenses—associated with healthcare costs and time-consuming processes—by up to $93.6 million per year.

The customer

Based in Norway, the customer is a software provider for the healthcare industry. Founded in 2016, the company aims to increase the accessibility of ophthalmology services. For its research, the startup was acclaimed by Innovasjon Norge—a governmental agency for innovation and development.

The need

As of 2015, the number of ophthalmologists in Norway was rather low—81 per million of population. (To compare, Greece has 182.6 and Latvia—127.9). As a result, patients could wait from weeks to a year for an appointment. This impaired the ability to conduct regular eye checks and endangered patients at risk (people with diabetes, older people, etc.) who could not receive timely care. It might also require a trip to another town due to the lack of a local expert.

To fast-track eye diagnostics, the customer recognized the opportunity to transfer the process from clinics to optical stores that had necessary equipment. Relying on Altoros, the company wanted to build a cloud-based platform that would enable sharing of pathology findings between opticians in stores and ophthalmologists in clinics contributing to remote diagnostics.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues: As the platform would store personal information and health records, it was crucial to ensure the security of sensitive data. Eye diagnostics was to be carried out on specialized equipment installed at optical stores. Opticians had to upload the photos taken to the system, so that ophthalmologists can analyze them remotely. Maintaining high resolution of the photos and preventing any quality loss was key to facilitating the analysis and safeguarding its precision.

The solution

Using Microsoft Azure at the infrastructure level, engineers at Altoros built a highly available cloud-native system that makes it to possible to share diagnostics findings between opticians and ophthalmologists. By developing the platform as a set of microservices, our team ensured ease of maintenance without the need to rewrite the whole system. With Azure Service Fabric, developers at Altoros enabled autoscaling, health monitoring, and fault tolerance.

To protect sensitive data, our engineers employed the tooling available in Azure Active Directory, including multi-factor authentication and role-based access control. To further enforce security, the team utilized data encryption of personal information and shared records. Then, our developers created a module for image preprocessing and denoising. The module also includes six filters: the RGB color model, grayscale, etc. Using them, ophthalmologists could make necessary color adjustments to identify any pathologies captured by the diagnostics equipment. In addition, the module featured an editor that allowed for zooming in/out the images and increasing contrast. Furthermore, it was possible to highlight the findings and comment them out. The delivered functionality contributed to both maintaining the sufficient image quality and efficient remote communication between opticians and ophthalmologists.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer built a cloud-native platform that enables efficient remote collaboration between opticians in stores and ophthalmologists in clinics, reducing the time spent on diagnostics to just 15 minutes. Thanks to the system, people no longer have to wait for weeks to get an appointment as they can now test their eyesight at a local optical store.

With the delivered system, the company was able to sign up two largest Norwegian chains of optics, onboarding 40% of opticians in the country who facilitate counseling. The startup estimated that the platform had the potential to reduce social expenses—associated with healthcare costs and time-consuming processes—by $51.5–$93.6 million annually.