Case study: Building Salute Safety, EHS software

EHS stands for environmental, health, and safety measures. In order to comply with EHS guidelines, organizations must meet a number of strict requirements aimed at maintaining high safety standards. Salute serves hospitals, medical laboratories, and research facilities for whom environmental health and safety are particularly high priorities.

The Salute platform automates the process of identifying, tracking, and resolving EHS issues. Application admin users can implement safety procedures, assign corresponding tasks to facility staff, and manage access at different levels of the organization.

Imagine a hospital cabinet with high-potency drugs. If an employee walks by and notices that the lock is broken, they can report the issue through the Salute platform. The case is then shared with the appropriate hospital administrator, who can delegate the proper tasks to team members. Safety issues such as this can be identified and resolved much more quickly through a streamlined, centralized platform.

The EHS safety platform is broken into two corresponding applications—an EHS Portal where employees can submit new issues and a Community Portal where administrators can delegate tasks and track progress.

Employees use the EHS portal in three main ways:

Administrators can create new accounts for managers and grant permissions in relevant business areas where Salute Safety is implemented.

Administrators use the community portal to manage the resolution of issues submitted through the EHS Portal:

• Delegate tasks: Administrators can assign tasks to team members necessary to resolve EHS issues.
• Manage progress: As each case is addressed, employees can mark tasks as “complete” to let administrators know that issues have been resolved.
• Review facility protocols: Employees with appropriate access can manage a list of laboratories in the organization
  and review chemical substances available in the facility.
• Monitor equipment and places: Administrators can review the current state and needs for individual issues.
• Assign training: Administrators can assign employees to complete specific training modules.
• Generate reports: Administrators can create reports both individually and for the entire organization.

HTD designed and built Salute’s EHS software specifically around medical stakeholders’ needs and preferences, including integrations with numerous information technology systems within medical centers. In addition, the team incorporated several features to enable new workflows via QR code for physical inventories.

During implementation, the HTD team sought to achieve three core goals:

• Design a user-friendly and intuitive platform user experience (UX).
• Develop an application architecture that allows for safe migration of data from legacy systems.
• Support new organizations using the Salute Safety platform.

The project team was selected for technical competencies (knowledge of Ruby on Rails, ReactJS, and PostgreSQL). To fully maximize work results, it was crucial to effectively collaborate with the Salute team.

The project was staffed with the following HTD roles:

The team leveraged HTD best practices to ensure a smooth relationship with the client and efficient development progress.

The HTD team first established clear priorities with the Salute Safety team. For this project, business and user priorities were as follows:

• Develop the automated tool to support hospitals to be compliant with EHS principles.
• Develop appropriate procedures and mechanisms supporting the transition of different kinds of data from hospital’s current software to the Salute Safety platform.
• Efficiently adapt the features of the application to the needs of future users.
• Help end-users to ensure seamless operation while transferring data

The team determined that the Scrum framework was optimal for the Salute Safety project. It enabled product team members to maintain a constant focus on the client’s needs. The process was divided into regular sprints and events as well as daily planning retrospectives.

Daily meetings allowed the team to:

• Implement tasks
• Set clear and tangible priorities effectively
• Solve ongoing problems

Jira was used to manage the development backlog and Slack was used for quick, effective communication between team members and the client.

Regular meetings with the client allowed the HTD team to understand future users’ preferences better and adapt the application’s features to their needs. Throughout the project, engineers proactively recommended the best programming solutions to the client based on business and user needs.

The team conducted regular code reviews to ensure the highest possible level of delivered software.

Deployment of the Salute Safety software consisted of four key stages.

The team began by analyzing the initial situation of a new user, e.g. a hospital whose existing solution had not fully met the efficiency and performance requirements. HTD’s role was first to identify the needs for managing the different types of data that were currently stored in the database.

Product team members also focused on developing appropriate procedures and mechanisms to support the transition to the Salute Safety platform. It was crucial to ensure that the platform launch would not disrupt the continuity of hospital work.

After launch, HTD worked with the client to determine which functionalities should be implemented to increase the effectiveness of the organization at the level of supported processes and procedures.

HTD analyzed to what extent the application met all the needs for EHS support in the organization. This was the basis for defining the scope of the project and specifying the most important functionalities and objectives. At this stage, the most important objectives were established so that the HTD team could implement all necessary improvements in the system tailored to the individual needs of the hospital. This applied in particular to the EHS standards in place.

HTD analyzed and designed the most optimal migration path from the legacy software to the Salute Safety platform. Based on the analysis, the team implemented many technical improvements in the system. In collaboration with client stakeholders, they identified all risk areas within the application and implemented changes to ensure that system transfer would not affect the hospital’s operations. This would allow for a smooth transition to the new solution.

After the basic implementation of the platform, the team launched another software instance and performed an evolutionary implementation of the new system.