CPA
Building a medical cannabis treatment app for European patients
Challenge
Build a concept for a mobile app that helps medical cannabis patients stay on track with their prescriptions and monitor their treatment.
Outcome
In 4 months, we created a functional mobile app and a dashboard for providing analytics and managing options and users.
About the project
More and more Europeans are turning to cannabis for medical treatment. We were invited to participate in a project that aims to improve the experience of using cannabis as a medicine.
The goal of the project was to create a prototype of a mobile app that allows users to stay on track with their medical prescriptions and record how they respond to the prescribed treatment.
Over the course of 4 months, we worked closely with the project stakeholders and a designer to conceptualize user flows and develop the mobile app, along with the internal management dashboard.
Approach
When working on new concepts, our approach is always to strip down the nice-to-haves, focus solely on the core solution, and deliver working software as fast as possible. We worked closely with the app's stakeholders to come up with a minimalistic user flow that we can implement quickly enough and yet offer sufficient value to the user.
Once we created a documented plan for the implementation, a team consisting of a backend developer and a mobile developer started working on building out the functionality.
The project consists of a backend API and a dashboard, built on Elixir and running on AWS, while the mobile app is built on React Native. We structured this in a way so that the app is entirely managed through the backend, thus keeping all app configurations flexible while leaving the doors open to building additional user interfaces (desktop, web).
Technology
React Native
We leveraged React Native to develop the mobile app, enabling rapid deployment and having a cross-platform experience with just one codebase. Additionally, we implemented Redux for efficient state management within the app.
Elixir
Our backend and admin area are built using Elixir and Phoenix. As the mobile app relies on multiple admin-managed datasets, Phoenix's performant APIs give us the confidence that our app offers the users a blazing-fast experience.
AWS
The app's backend and databases run securely on AWS. As the app is handling sensitive user data within the EU, security and reliability are a top priority and AWS allows us to handle that. We use EC2, RDS and other DevOps services.