When a patient ends up in the emergency room, their illness is treated. However, that patient may still lack access to essential services such as food, housing, or childcare - critical sources of stress, which correlate with a high likelihood of getting sick again.

In order to solve this problem, Healthify builds healthcare and social services software. Their system connects social workers and hospitals with tracking features to help them identify local social service providers to match patients’ needs. They can then see whether that patient received those social services and if they had positive outcomes.

Before Healthify’s work, patients have been referred to services, but their outcomes had not been tracked in one system. The ability to improve systems around the delivery of social services to patients can lead to drastically improved health outcomes both in the short and long term. This, in turn, reduces service costs for health organizations, the individuals, and taxpayers.

Healthify came to thoughtbot through knowledge of thoughtbot’s free open source gems which supported the code that the Healthify team was using. The Healthify team also familiarized themselves with thoughtbot’s web development best practices which ultimately led the them to reach out to work together.

The mission of the project was to build a new product offering for coordinating care within a network of social services. Healthify already had customers who were using their Search product and they wished to build on their offering for managing patient health information. This work would lead to buy-in from additional customers and prepare them for their next fundraising round.

The two teams first worked together to build out a more robust version of the patient health management product. The Healthify team built their early stack on Ruby on Rails, jQuery, and Aptible (HIPAA compliant web-hosting). From there, thoughtbot helped them lay the groundwork for the coordinating network product utilizing React, Postgres, and Elasticsearch.

In addition to working on the technology platforms for Healthify’s products, the thoughtbot team worked as quickly as possible to skill up Healthify’s engineering team. thoughtbot helped inform their technical infrastructure, brought new approaches to testing and design practices, and reformed the team’s approach to stand-ups, retros, and design sprints.

Over the course of three years, Healthify hired thoughtbot each time their development team reached a new growth period when expansion was needed, or a specialized skill set was added to their team. Healthify was scaling up quickly and hired thoughtbot to help them at the moments when they were most needed.

With this help from thoughtbot executed during strategic periods of growth, Healthify’s departments expanded smoothly.

Using Healthify, social workers can search for the right social services for their patients, share data with other social services more effectively, and track patient outcomes.

thoughtbot was very lucky to work with Healthify in these early stages and to help facilitate their growth. Working together, thoughtbot was able to help Healthify build faster, hire their team, and institute best development practices for their engineering team. We are excited to see their company continue to grow and the positive impact they will continue to have on social determinants of health across the country.