How we built ESO's next generation iPad application for patient data capture

Background

ESO is a leading provider of software for emergency services. With a mission to improve community health and safety through the power of data, ESO develops products that streamline operations, reporting, and clinical management for first responders.

Their Electronic Health Record (EHR) app offers a comprehensive solution for emergency medical services to access patient data and produce clinical documentation. It is a highly successful product, however, its Windows-based app had started to encounter challenges - most notably, it lacked mobile accessibility, the user experience had become outdated, and a reliance on specialised hardware was negatively impacting total cost of ownership.

From Windows to iOS

To address these issues, ESO made the decision to augment the Windows app with a native iPad application. The new app needed to provide a compelling alternative to the existing one. It had to offer a best-in-class user experience and it needed to drive more efficient workflows by leveraging the advanced capabilities of the iPad, including speech to text recognition.

Approach

So, what did we do?

• Assembled a multi-disciplinary team of designers, business analysts and iOS engineers to work as a single team with ESO's product managers, all pointed in the same direction.

• Optimised the discovery process by capturing and refining user requirements through flexible, visual workflows, and leveraging Kanban to accelerate decision-making with the ESO product team.

• Created a design system that adhered to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to ensure a completely intuitive user experience for iPad users.

• Built a native iOS application in Swift to accelerate delivery, enable offline functionality, and leverage iOS capabilities across multiple Apple platforms, not just iPad.

Impact

The new EHR iPad application was unveiled at Wave 2024 to great acclaim, leading to over 1,600 customers signing up for beta access. In broad terms, here's what the team achieved:

• Accelerated delivery - Instil's iOS expertise helped ESO meet their deadlines significantly faster than they would have done by building their own team.

• User experience - Instil's advocacy for Apple's user interface standards has resulted in a best-in-class user experience for iPad users.

• Cross-platform support - the application is targeted at iPad users but is capable of running on multiple platforms, including Vision Pro.

Overall, the app makes data entry simple through innovative features such as speech-to-text, multitasking and scanning, allowing users to stay focused on what matters: delivering better patient care. As Russell Beggs (ESO, SVP of Engineering) said:

This is our second project with Instil and working with them has always been a pleasure. The team are extremely easy to work with and their expertise in building iOS products has helped us accelerate delivery and create market-leading application. If you are looking for a development partner that you can trust to deliver, I couldn't recommend Instil highly enough.

Russell Beggs VP of Engineering