In the past 10 years, tech has revolutionized industries like finance, e-commerce and the hospitality sector. But according to Rachel Schneebaum, a senior iOS engineer at Medly, there seems to be a major industry that’s been left behind.
Healthcare.
“We can do so much with technology, but the healthcare industry has traditionally been terrible,” she said. “It’s getting a lot better, but there are still gaps.”
For example, Bailey Kass, a product designer at Medly, explained that a patient might have as many as five different touch points between doctors, insurance, pharmacies and more just to get a prescription (Rx) refill.
“This applies to many areas of healthcare,” Kass said. “Seemingly simple tasks still require a lot of communication and action across different parties.”
Medly is trying to simplify the process.
The digital pharmacy startup that provides same-day prescription delivery is on a mission to help make communities healthier by providing equal access to quality pharmacy services — and they’re using tech to do it.
One example is with Medly’s iOS app, which is currently in development by people like Schneebaum and will be released by the end of the year. The app will allow patients to schedule prescription deliveries, access their Rx history and so much more.
The best part? The team members who are collaborating on this project are using innovative technology, and building the app from the ground up.
“We are working on a meaningful product that is making a difference in our patients’ lives,” Delia Bennett, a product manager focused on the iOS app, said. “It will impact an industry that isn’t being well-served by technology.”
It couldn’t have come at a better time. Medly is poised for scale after its June acquisition of the pharmacy chain Pharmaca. Built In NYC spoke with three people involved in the development of the iOS app to learn how they’ve collaborated on the project and what excites them most about working at Medly.
Tell us more about what the iOS app will do.
Delia Bennett, product manager: Patients will be able to schedule deliveries and transfer their prescriptions from their current pharmacy to Medly via the app. They’ll be able to upload their insurance information, pay via insurance, pay out of pocket, and pull all of their Medly patient Rx history.
Bailey Kass, product designer: We’ll also be able to show what the status is for each of their prescriptions. So it’s not just a mystery box; you’ll see when your prescription is being processed, when it’s filled, and when it’s ready for delivery.
Bennett: We also built this app to scale and quickly develop features, so we’re able to have feature updates every month for our patients, or even more frequently. We are building this very intentionally; this is built to really serve our users and to grow with our user base.
PHARMACA ACQUISITION
What are some of the challenges that come with scaling tech like this?
Kass: The main challenge with designing for scale is the “building the plane while you’re flying it” idea. We want all of our different services and products to interlock. We want one patient’s profile to be the same across different experiences. There are a lot of moving parts, including the foundational parts. We’re building the sources of truth while we need to refer to them.
Bennett: It also involves a lot of stakeholder expectation management and prioritization across products.
What type of cool new tech is being used to develop this iOS app?
Rachel Schneebaum, senior iOS engineer: We use SwiftUI and Combine. SwiftUI lets you build clean, simple, lightweight and declarative views that you can reuse and combine easily. Then there’s Combine, which works really well with SwiftUI for data binding. This combo creates a reactive way to build iOS apps. The views and models communicate easily back and forth.
SwiftUI is a lot of fun to work with in general. It’s so lightweight and composable. You don’t have to deal with all of this boilerplate. Plus, working on it now gives you experience. If you start learning it at the beginning, then you have all of this foundational knowledge about why certain things turned out the way that they did, and how things work under the hood. Getting a chance to do that with SwiftUI and be on the forefront is great experience to have — for now and for any future opportunities. Many other engineers who don’t work with SwiftUI at their jobs are trying to decide how much to work with it to gain experience. We actually get to work with it for our jobs.
Getting a chance to do that with SwiftUI and be on the forefront is great experience to have — for now and for any future opportunities.’’
How have you collaborated on this app?
Kass: Within the iOS team, we have good cross-functional communication. If I’m working on a design, I will often throw it in Slack to get quick feedback from engineers and designers to make sure that it’s feasible. Similarly, if an engineer runs into a limitation or a challenge implementing a design, we can have that back and forth. Product is always looped in as well.
Bennett: In terms of collaboration across teams, I think there is this element of learning as we go with respect to constant communication and cross-collaboration with design, product, marketing, engineering and our patient experience teams.
Schneebaum: Every day, I’m talking to Bailey and our back-end engineer about a feature I’m working on. We’re always checking in and getting updates. It’s very comprehensive.
CLIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS
What excites you most about working at Medly?
Bennett: I don’t have a background in healthtech, but I wanted to work on a meaningful product that felt like it was making a difference in our patients’ lives. That’s what excites me the most about working at Medly, and especially all of the possibilities with our Pharmaca acquisition. We’re not just a digital pharmacy. There’s room for us to continue to grow and be so much more.
Kass: For me, a big part of it is just the ethos of the company. We get into the nitty gritty of things. For example, our team recently discussed whether we have to ask for a patient’s sex at birth on the iOS app, or if that is something that we can exclude and simply ask for pronouns. Getting into those sorts of details and having those discussions exemplifies the fact that we’re all here for the right reasons. I also love the impact I can have in joining a company that’s in its very early stages. We don’t know what’s on the horizon, and that excites me.
We’re not just a digital pharmacy. There’s room for us to continue to grow and be so much more.’’
Schneebaum: At Medly, it really does feel like everyone is passionate and deeply cares about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It’s exciting to be able to build a new app from the ground up, use cutting-edge tools, have some ownership over the product and impact conversations about where it goes. I’m learning a lot.
