The Project

Waiting time management (WTM) was a co-innovation project between the SAP Innovation Center and the Helios hospital in Berlin Buch. Co-innovation means that you work with an organization that actually needs your solution. This is to ensure that projects solve a real-world problem and you have a first customer.

The goal was to build a screen that displays and predicts waiting times for patients. Patients can be sitting in an emergency department after an accident of the hospital. Or waiting for a regular appointment.

The project evolved in two phases. First, a basic prototype was build and validated with patients and doctors.

Then, we saw that it would make a good product. Development mode changed from prototyping to proper product development. Leading to a first public product release after only 6 months.

The Technology

The prototype was build in Java on Netty.

After the decision to turn it into a real product, we wanted to migrate it into the cloud on AWS. It became a SaaS solution. The hospital sends us patient status update messages. We process them and display them in real-time.

AWS Lambda and the serverless framework were thus a good choice for the project. And it freed us from maintaining a lot of infrastructure.

We also leveraged other ready-to-use services: CloudFormation, CloudWatch, Kinesis, Simple Notification Service, S3, API Gateway and Certificate Manager.

In the back-end, we continued to use a JVM language. Scala was picked (while I would have preferred Kotlin in the JVM world).

We implemented the front-end in AngularJS.

The Impact

We installed the solution in several waiting rooms across hospitals. Surveys showed that patient satisfaction in the waiting rooms increased. The project won a Red-Dot award.

Get In Touch

If you think this can be useful for you, just say ‘hi’ via email. I will be happy to grab a coffee, talk with your or just have a short call. Let me know :)