How a Non-Technical Endocrinologist Built a HIPAA-Compliant Patient Health Tracker with Aloa

"Aloa was great for someone like me. I had an idea and a business plan, but I was out of my depth. After my struggles coordinating with teams in other countries and finding HIPAA-compliant developers, having Aloa's expertise was absolutely worth the money."

Dr. Lindsey VanDyke, DO, FACOI, FEAA

Founder

DiaDirect's Founder Sought to Automate Patient Health Tracking to Improve Patient Care and Scale Her Practice with a HIPAA-Compliant Platform

After years of working with endocrinology patients, Dr. Lindsey VanDyke, Director at the Advanced Institute for Diabetes & Endocrinology (Aidendo), set out to make an app that could help patients capture vital health metrics directly from their personal Bluetooth-enabled devices. The app, called DiaDirect, would allow patients to track metrics such as blood pressure, weight, blood sugar, and more, all from the comfort of their homes and using devices they already owned.

Dr. VanDyke spent several frustrating weeks trying to find developers with HIPAA experience on Fiverr and was close to giving up before she found Aloa. Aloa perfectly fit her criteria of not only being able to build a HIPAA-compliant platform but also deliver an app that looked modern and functioned well.

HIPAA and Medicare Compliance Made Easy

DiaDirect deals directly with safely storing and transmitting Protected Health Information (PHI) and therefore must remain HIPAA compliant both at rest and in transit. Aloa ensured security by, among other measures, encrypting all data at rest and in transit with AES-256 encryption.

In addition to HIPAA compliance, the app needed to satisfy the necessary criteria for billing codes under Remote Patient Monitoring and Chronic Care Management services as outlined by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). This includes time tracking, data logs, documentation, and more, which would usually result in time-consuming paperwork and meticulously tracking time-in and time-out for healthcare staff. DiaDirect makes this process easy by automatically tracking time and keeping an audit log of every action performed by staff, in addition to providing an easy way to export this information.

Aloa's Guidance Enabled Dr. VanDyke to Remain a Full-Time Endocrinologist While Building DiaDirect

During the day, Dr. VanDyke still had a clinic to run, so she turned to Aloa's Product Owner and Customer Success Managers to communicate her needs to the development team. She knew the process would be long and complicated, but the guidance that Aloa provided allowed her to focus on her main business while we managed the day-to-day development.

Aloa selected a mobile app development teams from our global partner network that had both a proven track record in building HIPAA-compliant mobile apps as well as working with non-technical founders. The project proceeded with a guided discovery phase that was designed as workshops to help Dr. VanDyke get her ideas onto paper, and Aloa further refined it by cutting extraneous features that were out of her preferred timeline.

DiaDirect Launches for Internal Beta Testing

After a few months of development, DiaDirect was ready for testing at Dr. VanDyke's clinic. The beta testing would allow Dr. VanDyke to prove out the usefulness of the app with real patients and collect feedback to improve future versions of the app. With their new online patient health dashboard, her clinic staff was able to keep on top of changes in patient health metrics and patients could also reduce the number of necessary office visits by using the app to integrate with their Bluetooth-enabled glucose meters and other devices.

Looking Ahead to a Nation-wide Rollout

As DiaDirect undergoes more testing and development phases with Aloa, Dr. VanDyke hopes to strengthen the capability of the platform until it's ready to license to endocrinology clinics all across the US. DiaDirect would enable clinics to replicate the same improvement in patient care, patient outcomes, and staff workflows that it has brought Dr. VanDyke's clinic near Dallas, TX.