Setting up an offshore development center for Asia’s largest chain of hospitals

To augment their in-house team, Apollo Hospitals Group interviewed and hired senior-level resources to work in collaboration with their team. A dedicated team with expertise in React Native, NodeJS, and Drupal was aligned by Daffodil to upgrade the functionality and performance of the Apollo 247 app. Both the teams connect through daily scrum meetings to share requirements, progress, backlogs, reviews, etc.  

The Daffodil team optimized the mobile app with the following functionalities:

Brand Pages: Instead of populating all the available products in the pharmacy section on one page, separate landing pages for each leading brand were created. With thoughtfully crafted metadata and automated workflows, customers can discover new brands and also the right products that suit their needs.

User Activity And Analytics: The app can be paired with user-activity monitoring devices such as sugar monitors and fitness watches to know when a user starts or stops an activity like running, biking, or driving. The underlying user-activity analytics is done with Firebase, which works in tandem with a quantity nudge. Automatic reminders can be set to buy medicines for certain lifestyle-based ailments such as diabetes and hypertension based on these analytics.

Quantity Nudge: For ailments that require regular filling of prescriptions, a quantity nudge has been included in the app. Whenever such medicine is ordered, it suggests the recommended quantity so that the user does not run out of medicine quickly. A reminder is also sent both as a WhatsApp notification and an in-app notification to pre-order the medicine and refill the prescription. Users also have the option to set medicine reminders on their own and set restrictions for medicine order quantities.

Enhancements For Online Pharmacy: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been integrated so that prescriptions can be clicked, uploaded, and converted to text automatically. Special offers and membership rewards are added automatically to every purchase made by the user. Cart management has been moved to the server-side, meaning that adding products to the cart reflects on both the web and mobile apps simultaneously. 

Network Coverage Calibration: A check is done before a user places a call with an Apollo certified physician to see if their network bandwidth can support an uninterrupted video or audio call. Bandwidth and connectivity metrics are frequently sent to the back-end and the user is suggested to either switch to Wi-Fi or move to an area where there is better connectivity before placing a call.

Help Section: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was earlier carried out through a third-party CRM was shifted to a newer one. Repetitive support workflows can be automated by the admin when needed. This helps bypass the need to hire help desk employees in bulk, which has helped Apollo Hospitals Group cut costs massively. Searching, assigning, replying and resolving tickets is far more seamless with the new CRM. The user also gets query suggestions related to the products and services that they choose.

Better Search Results: Partial as well as complete searches for products and services have been optimized to provide the most relevant information in search results. Elastic search capabilities allow the aggregation of the most accurate search results in very little time and results are tailored based on user activity on the app.