A Global Web Platform for HIV Detection and Monitoring

The success of Alere Data Point™ portal as part of the Alere™ Connectivity programme, has seen Blue Frontier’s relationship flourish with Alere as a dependable development partner. The project team continues to maintain and develop the solution, now supporting further devices, such as the Alere™ Analyser for point-of-care HIV detection across territories throughout Africa, Asia and South America.

Alere are a global leader in medical research, diagnostics and point-of-care testing, employing 10,000+ worldwide. We were approached by their R&D team, who were looking to collaborate with an experienced project team to define, design and develop a web-based platform to support the global connected health programme for the screening and monitoring of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

With the Alere Pima™ CD4 Analyser device in the field in a number of African countries, Alere were looking to develop a solution to collect, collate and analyse the test data transmitted by each device; solving the problem of connecting remote devices to a centralised data warehouse. Its aim being to extend quality laboratory services to rural populations, effectively maintaining central laboratory control and monitoring while improving service delivery and patient outcomes.

With a business objective and a handful of use cases, we set out on this collaborative project, providing specialist resource for the design, development, testing and release of the solution.

Using wireframing and graphics packages to produce design concepts and mockups, the specification of the platform was an ongoing aspect of the agile project; as we looked to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) as the initial implementation of a continuous development programme.

The web-based solution released as the Alere Data Point™ portal, used the test-driven development (TDD) approach, to ensure a stable, issue-free codebase, and with a number of developers maintaining the code as well as server architecture incorporating development, QA, UAT and production servers, a number of continuous development and project management tools were employed to ensure consistency and efficiency in the successful delivery.

For the agile methodology, the project is run with a ScrumMaster, managing daily stand-ups, across sprints with collaborative planning and sizing sessions to ensure the project team are well-informed and coordinated; where blockers are raised early and tasks are prioritised, sized and assigned effectively.

In addition to the development, Blue Frontier were able to offer technical writing skills to produce customer-facing version release notes and user manuals, as well as technical documentation to support design and usability studies.

Going from strength to strength, the Alere Data Point™ portal receives device data transmitted from devices located in the most extreme of locations, delivering point-of-care diagnostics to a central repository to provide real-time analysis and visualisation of statistics for improved device and disease management.