OrbitalRX provides an all-in-one platform for pharmacists to unify data while proactively managing drug shortages, bringing the power of real-time situational awareness in a health system pharmacy-focused workflow.

The Problem

Hospitals often rely on rudimentary, time-consuming tools, like spreadsheets, to manage their response when a medication is difficult to obtain. As you can imagine, maintaining this data requires great time and effort, pulling pharmacy staff away from their patient-focused activities and risking unsafe medication usage. The inability to properly manage drug shortages decreases the quality of patient care, since pharmacists aren’t able to prescribe necessary drugs when needed.

Recognizing the need for a better and faster way to manage drug shortages, the OrbitalRX team sought Augusto Digital’s help to develop a comprehensive software solution that would empower pharmacy leaders to automate their medication shortage workflows.

Why OrbitalRX Chose Augusto

OrbitalRX chose Augusto Digital as their digital partner to address the critical issue of managing drug shortages in hospitals. Augusto’s ability to quickly turn broad visions into functional systems within a six-week cycle, coupled with their deep understanding of healthcare software development, made us the ideal choice. We developed a comprehensive software solution that integrated seamlessly with various pharmacy information systems, enabling real-time data insights and continuous delivery capabilities. This partnership not only improved the efficiency of managing drug shortages but also enhanced patient care by allowing pharmacists to focus more on their clinical roles​​​​​​.

Augusto's Solution

In the first six-week cycle, our goal was to turn OrbitalRX’s broad vision into a functional system. We worked in close communication with their team to establish an architecture and develop a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) within those first six weeks of engagement. However, as with any project, we faced several challenges.

First

The first challenge was the complexity of pharmacy information systems. Hospitals have numerous databases—many of which are vastly different from each other—and unique, vendor-specific systems. We tackled this challenge by building flexible integrations that offer an unprecedented view into the state of pharmacies’ operations.

Second

The ability to respond quickly to changing customer needs and market conditions is crucial to success in the modern health care field. The OrbitalRX team needed a system that could not only deliver value from the onset, but also undergo continuous iterations and improvements over its lifetime. By building continuous delivery capabilities into OrbitalRX’s system, we have positioned their team for ongoing growth and a product that is continuously improved with user feedback.

The Results

Augusto Digital was thrilled to design a solution architecture for OrbitalRX that would address the priorities of pharmacy departments across the country, bringing better care to their patients.

Our goal was to create a high-functioning system that could be easily scaled up over time. Developing the OrbitalRX system with modern software engineering practices in mind, we built core components such as a RESTful API and ReactJS web application.

We also made sure that all core components utilized Amazon AWS serverless technologies—including Lambda, Relational Database Service, Simple Queue Service, CloudFront, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and CloudWatch—to minimize the burden of supplying this technology to pharmacies around the country. Using these technologies allowed us to develop quickly and in an iterative fashion—while keeping costs to a minimum and operational overhead virtually non-existent.

The OrbitalRX team came to Augusto Digital with an ambitious implementation schedule, so we relied on our experience with agile development methodologies—six-week cycles, broken into two-week sprints—to rapidly develop their first product.