New development of a cross-platform medication search app

ifap app ‘Arznei aktuell’

The challenge

In the healthcare sector, it is essential to have safe, comprehensive and up-to-date drug information at hand at all times and to be able to check medications for possible interactions with each other. ifap offers its customers all of this with the app “Arznei aktuell”, which is one of the top 10 most successful medicine apps with over 250,000 active users.

Therefore, there are plenty of reasons for ifap to continuously develop and improve the software. The desire for maintainable feature development led to the redesign of the Arznei aktuell app. Thanks to XITASO, this redesign is not only maintainable but also offers a significantly improved user experience.

ifap

As one of the leading manufacturers of digital drug databases, ifap Service-Institut für Ärzte und Apotheker GmbH offers its customers in the healthcare sector innovative software solutions that can be used to find the most suitable drug therapy for patients. ifap is a subsidiary of CompuGroup Medical and has around 90 employees at its headquarters in Planegg.

How we helped

Instead of the previous implementation as separate, native Android and iOS apps, XITASO has redeveloped the application as a cross-platform app from scratch using the latest technologies. This approach enables good future maintainability and offers centralised expandability for the Android and iOS platforms.

The additional implementation of an internal web portal also enables ifap employees to manage the app user data intuitively. The entire development process took place in close collaboration with the customer, with regular meetings and workshops ensuring optimal coordination.

Technologies

Angular TypeScript Java Swift Capacitor SQLite Cypress

App features

New developments and improvements

  • Search and detailed information on medicines with offline functionality
  • Display of drug news from a news feed
  • Display of constantly updated advertising from various data sources
  • Enhanced registration process with integrated approval process for professional certificates
  • In-app purchases

App management

Conception and implementation

  • a user management system
  • an internal web portal for support to carry out approval processes

Data protection

Data protection is of the utmost importance in the medical sector. For this reason, user declarations of consent are obtained and stored for all data collection and before some features are used. These can be withdrawn by e-mail, whereby it is always recorded who initiated a change. The internal employee portal always indicates when data may no longer be used and data deletion must be initiated. During the approval process for use as specialised personnel, the data is deleted after processing and it is also noted who carried out the process.

The development process

The new development of the app took place in several iterations, after each of which the new features were presented in a test version of the app. The regular feedback was directly taken into account and incorporated into further planning. Additional short alignment calls also allowed ambiguities or open questions to be clarified directly, which contributed to efficient development. Furthermore, workshops were held at irregular intervals in which more complex topics with a major impact on further planning were discussed in detail.

This close partnership-based co-operation, which relies on early customer feedback, is the basis of every project success. Find out more here.

Other projects

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Dr. Julia Driessen

Phone +49 821 885882-335
julia.driessen@xitaso.com