SharpQuest Helped Develop New Insulin Management System—Improving Diabetes Care

Hygieia had developed a process and a device to better manage insulin care, but they needed a way for physicians to onboard patients for using the device and an interface for physicians to manage the treatment process. This meant they needed a technology partner with broad and deep resources to help bring their product to fruition. Hygieia CTO, Mark Willis had worked with SharpQuest in three previous startup successes, so it was an easy choice to select SharpQuest as their technology partner.

SharpQuest helped Hygieia with the internal line of business applications that the staff uses for managing the interaction with patients, and the HCP-facing website that provides information to the referring physician's team about their patients using d-Nav. SharpQuest developed CareView, an application portal for the service providers (physicians) to onboard the patients and manage their treatment using Hygieia’s proprietary process.

Willis described the resource breakdown, “SharpQuest has worked on a website that is used by our staff and the referring physicians who send us patients. We have a couple of internal resources involved in the project, myself included. We tended to work on the backend, on the data tier. SharpQuest's team developed most of the GUI [graphical user interface]. Building functionality that spanned frontend and backend was done collaboratively.”

Hygieia has been very pleased with the experience working with SharpQuest resources. Willis noted, “I've primarily interacted with their senior resources, but the junior ones have played a big role in the project as well. I've always found SharpQuest's team to be fully talented with a full understanding of the domain. They're always bringing insight into how we can solve a problem or debug a glitch.” Willis went on to say, “SharpQuest's responsiveness is fantastic. They're always quick to respond and collaborative in their approach.”

The work done by SharpQuest is paying off for Hygieia and the patients using their d-Nav Program. A recent study showed that patients using the d-Nav service have an annual cost savings of 86% which equates to thousands of dollars. This savings comes from a large reduction in anti-diabetes prescriptions, less insulin used and less healthcare costs due to the health improvement achieved with Hygieia.

Hygieia is also seeing improved satisfaction from patients in the care they are receiving, going from 55% to 92.5% after 3 months of using the d-Nav Program. Most importantly, clinical trials have shown rapid improvement and sustainability of blood sugar levels.

SharpQuest continues to work with Hygieia to make improvements to their product and support its use. Willis continues to be pleased with their work, “SharpQuest has a high-touch service. They're collaborative and do everything possible to support our project, both on the brainstorming side of things and the implementation one.”