Zaptag had an innovative solution for storing travellers’ personal medical records: a robust USB driver to store all vital health information. But what became the key to success in a niche market was Microsoft development tools that helped Zaptag develop an online version of its product.
“The main driver to move away from open source to Microsoft was to get a professional application out into the market quickly. It had to be robust, adhering to all the stringent security standards.”
Jas Singh, Chief Technology Officer, Zaptag
Zaptag offers a portable solution for storing a traveller’s personal medical records. A service that started up with open source technology and was delivered using a USB drive is now available via the Web. Mobile devices are the next step. The speed of development has risen tenfold with Microsoft® technologies, helping company executives spend more time—up to 75 per cent— on commercial aspects of the business, compared to just 10 per cent earlier. Zaptag is already attracting interest from major healthcare providers and even the United Nations and large global enterprises.
“With Microsoft, all the technology easily fits together out of the box, and is scalable. So when developing a product you can focus on the ability to deliver services to the customer rather than whether it will integrate with other technologies.”
Jas Singh, Chief Technology Officer, Zaptag
The personal health market has seen significant consumer interest in recent months, with more people wanting to take control of their health information and healthcare providers looking at innovative ways to improve and differentiate their service.
In 2005, the founders of Zaptag, a progressive United Kingdom (U.K.) startup, spotted an unfulfilled need for people to take their medical records with them when travelling. The aim was to empower people to become custodians of their own health records, facilitating informed, accurate and rapid medical decisions, and, ultimately, delivering the best opportunity for prosperous health. As a result, Zaptag has created an easily accessible, secure online environment to access health records from anywhere in the world.
The company is seeking customers from large consumer groups. Ian Gallifant, Chief Executive Officer at Zaptag, says: “On one side we’ve got health groups such as asthma, allergy, or diabetes charities, but we’re also working with private health providers offering screening services and even non-governmental organisations such as the Red Cross. So we have around eight or nine verticals for marketing our product—we’re even trying to get the United Nations to use our solution as well as large enterprises with global operations.”
Zaptag already has a number of integrations with healthcare providers worldwide. Gallifant says: “Central to the Zaptag system is the relationships the company is developing with third-party providers in the U.K. and increasingly elsewhere so that we can stream medical data straight from a doctor or hospital desktop to a patient’s Zaptag online account.”
The startup has been on a journey with its product development since its inception in 2005. The initial release, in 2006, was an electronic dog tag with records stored onto an application on a USB key. It was in a proprietary XML format, and users had to manually update the data.
The next step was for users to be able to take content from the drive and back it up on an online account. Jas Singh, Chief Technology Officer at Zaptag explains: “This was the first step we made towards providing medical information online. It was written in the PHP scripting language at that point. We then launched a pre-release environment using open source technology. In addition to vital emergency medical information, Zaptag can contain further medical documents or images, and personal general files such as photographs and digital audio MP3 files.”
With commercial obligations beginning to gather momentum, Singh and his colleagues at Zaptag put a renewed focus on how to improve the technology. Singh adds: “We completely rewrote the USB application, starting in March 2008, which then led us to migrating the online version to Microsoft technology.”
Migration from Open Source
With this breakthrough came a change in business model—the emphasis is now on the Web offering rather than the USB key. Gallifant adds: “The hardware is now a USB-style credit card, which stores and synchronises health records with the online version, but increasingly we’re looking towards making medical information accessible on mobile devices.”
Migrating to Microsoft technologies has helped to address several challenges. Singh adds: “Robustness and speed are just part of the solution, the biggest advantage is greater security because we’re dealing with personal health records. Therefore, the application needs to be robust—it can’t be hacked or left vulnerable to attack.”
Microsoft also fulfilled the need for greater scalability. The experience Zaptag had with open source was that while development took a great deal of time and effort, a proprietary infrastructure could deal with the problem fairly easily. Singh says: “With Microsoft, all the technology fits togethereasily out of the box, and is scalable. So when developing a product you can focus on the ability to deliver services to the customer rather than whether it will integrate with other technologies.”
Previously, one of the biggest features concerning the card and online offerings was the synchronisation between the two—data transfer from the USB key or card to the online account needed to be quick and easy, without manually moving files. Zaptag found that the only way to deliver this was by using the out-of-the-box tools from Microsoft, especially the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 development system and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008. Singh says: “We used the pre-released version on Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework to build Model View Controller (MVC) for the online service and Windows® Communication Foundation for the synchronisation services, which helped us speed up development tenfold.”
Zaptag has three developers working on the application. It took just three months to completely rewrite the service in the .NET Framework and add new features and functionality. These include:
•The ability to synchronise without any manual intervention.
•A more defined schema of how the medical information is stored—this is important for closer integration with the health providers.
•Ability to categorise the health information that users either enter themselves or receive from a provider. Before, it was user-administered text but now, the application automatically classifies information into appropriate sections.
“You can add these features with open source, but it would take significantly more time and effort to do it. We didn’t have the resources. In addition, our developers were already experienced in Microsoft technologies,” Singh adds. “The main driver to move away from open source to Microsoft was to get a professional application out into the market quickly. It had to be robust, adhering to all the stringent security standards.”
Zaptag estimates that security has improved significantly from the previous version. Singh says: “Security is key for us because a lot of unencrypted personal data has gone missing lately in the U.K. We store all records on secure servers, and use data encryption as provided by Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 and the .NET Framework for added security. These security features can be made in open source, but it’s much easier to do it with Microsoft technologies because it’s a part of the .NET Framework.”
New Focus on Online Application
Zaptag development team is now focussing on enhancing the online version of its application. Singh says: “If you fill in information online—for example, blood sugar levels, heart rate—you can plug in your card to automatically synchronise records with the online information. It will soon become a Windows Mobile application so you can access your data using mobile devices.
Zaptag is also looking at integrating with more applications such as with healthcare providers to get data out of proprietary systems. Gallifant says: “We’re enriching the online experience so we can stream in data associated with a customer profile. For example, if a patient is diabetic we can stream in interesting articles to that patient. That’s the tool set we want to build in the future.”
Another key element in the solution is to support communication between customers and their healthcare providers and/or special interest groups. “We’re trying to let users—such as people suffering from the same illness—communicate with each other. It’s about building relationships by sharing data across different environments,” adds Gallifant.
The faster development process is proving valuable in helping the startup take these additional features to market. Previously, 90 per cent of the work at Zaptag focussed on product development and only 10 per cent on running the business. Now, with a more reliable technology environment, the company executives can spend less time on technology—just 25 per cent—and up to 75 per cent on commercial aspects of the business.
Gallifant says: “As a result, we are experiencing rapid business growth. By the fourth quarter of 2009, we expect to have nearly 500,000 users—and that might even be a conservative estimate. User groups such as Diabetes UK, which has 100,000 members, are already interested.”
Zaptag attributes a great deal of its success to its mature business partnership with Microsoft. “We received extensive support from many different departments at Microsoft—mainly for creating architectural concepts and guiding us in new technologies that weren’t available in the public domain at that time. It helped us greatly,” says Gallifant. “We plan to work with them again as we are interested in Microsoft cloud computing technology which offers the opportunity to adopt software-plus-services model for application delivery, and pass on the benefits to end users.”
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