Case Study: How we developed a Doctoring App

We are excited to present you Doctoring - a social network for doctors. Our clients idea gave us the possibility to prove the impact of the IT industry on different professional spheres once again.

Our clients Paul Christensen, Emily Christensen, Simon Read and Louise Read are doctors. Understanding the importance of professional communication they decided to bring together the community of doctors using modern technologies. As a result, an idea of the unique platform was born.

Our team has faced a global goal - to create a platform uniting doctors all over the UK. We know that global projects are always as challenging as they are spectacular. The Doctoring platform was exactly that kind.

Having got the design from our clients, we conducted a research allowing us to provide them with estimations and technology list. After the confirmation was received, our clients had several days to go over all the papers we'd handed out.

Through time, this goal was achieved by combining our efforts. During this project, a number of adjustments were made. However, having overcome everything, we can see the result - an exclusive social network for doctors around the UK.

Doctoring is now available on iTunes. It's Android version is coming soon and the website is on the stage of concept development.

Let's talk a little about the apps main features and non-functional project requirements

This cooperation created a social network providing a new professional communication experience. In order to form an appropriate community - the apps access was restricted by means of database implementation. This way, professionals have an opportunity to communicate with over 100,000 colleagues around the UK.

You will not find any usual registration methods in Doctoring. For this purpose, a registration bot was created. This way, when a user runs the app for the first time - this bot greets him. Then, it prompts to type the name and GMC number. In case everything is OK, the process of identity verification starts.

There are two ways to verify identity - via professional email or administrator. In the first case, you should follow the confirmation link. In case, the email confirmation is not an option - you should refer to the administrator with documents verifying your identity.

After these steps, a user will be able to access the app.

As any social-related app, Doctoring has a user profile. Except for pretty common information, doctors also may type their field of expertise, professional memberships, qualifications, location, publications etc.

This information can be helpful while looking for a professional consultation in various fields.

Doctoring mobile app development services allows you to use a wide range of search opportunities. You may search doctors by name, special interests, hospital and even location. Also, this app is able to give suggestions to users concerning doctors they may be acquainted with.

Doctoring uses RSS technology, this way, new posts from blogs will be sent to chat. These messages contain short information about an article. However, you can read full text by tapping on it.

Having all these features combined, a purely professional ecosystem is formed. As it was mentioned before - this platform was created to simplify doctors professional communication.

The project was pretty challenging. However, the game was worth the candle. Now, doctors all over the UK can communicate, share experiences and much more.

We have managed to create a professional multi-platform social network allowing professionals to work and communicate without any changes to their tight schedule.

After the contract was signed - we were set for development. In order to achieve the best work efficiency, we prepared a well-structured project plan including testing and development strategy. These strategies cover Web, Android, and iOS development.

Working on this project we have applied a variety of technologies repeatedly used before. This way, for the desired result, were used Elasticsearch (Search feature), Socket.IO (for chat implementation) as well as Amazon S3 as the image storage and much more.

During the chat development, we have used an open source technology that allowed us to cut down on a project's budget.

It is obvious that during any projects development some difficulties and problems are going to appear. Our case is not an exception.

We had some problems including minor problems with the database. Also, we were faced with an interesting problem connected with the search. Our client wanted us to implement the search by hospitals. I.e. a user types the hospitals name after what gets the list of doctors working there. The name of the hospital was taken as doctors first name or surname. It did not take much time till our coders had this problem solved by adding some keywords, turning the search to the right direction.

Nevertheless, as usual, our team has successfully overcome all these problems.

The testing stage was carried out according to the world-best practices. Our QA engineers were involved in the development process from the very beginning. While our coders were working on the code, the QA department was working out an appropriate testing strategy including a preliminary list of tests. This way, with the help of effective time management we did not lose time during this stage.

After the products were ready - the tests begun. It is worth mentioning that the process of testing involved the whole QA department as we had to deal with three platforms at once.

We started from API logic tests followed by functional testing. For the system knowledge - we carried out white, gray, and black-box testing. On the basis of existing design schemes - we ran testing of the user interface (GUI).

Detected bugs and minor issues during this stage were immediately fixed by our programmers.

The final stage of the projects implementation is it's transfer to the customer. Having successfully finished one more project - we passed the source code to the satisfied client.

It was a project full of challenging but interesting tasks. During it's implementation, we turned our knowledge into a new communication experience for professionals. We like similar projects, they make us stronger as professionals.

If you are thinking about your own mobile or web project creation - drop us a line. Our team will be glad to estimate and deliver your thoughts.