Scription: Healthtech MVP Platform Delivered in Seven Months

Scription, a UK-based health-tech startup, faced the challenge of rapidly developing a comprehensive prescription medication delivery system encompassing web and mobile platforms. The critical objective was to launch an MVP within a tight seven-month timeframe while ensuring a superior user experience for patients and pharmacists.

The company and product

Scription's goal is establishing the fastest and the most reliable private service of this sort on the local market.

Scription is a prescription delivery startup based in the UK and founded in 2020, with the goal of establishing the fastest and the most reliable private service of this sort on the local market, allowing patients and pharmacists to prescribe and get medications delivered within a few clicks in the app.

The founders, Sonny Hall and Charles Howard approached us in 2021, presenting their goals and a business plan. During the Discovery Phase for this project, we established a roadmap that would take us to an MVP release in 7 months (including design and development), and then allow for building it up into a fully-fledged web and mobile application.

Client’s feedback

Charles Howard

Co-founder of Scription Technologies

Essential support

The team at Monterail has been essential to us; we couldn't have done it without the breadth of structure that they have because what they provide is effective, including the business manager that runs the whole team working for us.

Scope and Highlights

WEB AND MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

RUBY ON RAILS

IONIC

MONTHS FROM A PLAN TO MVP

TEAM MEMBERS

419

COMMITS AND COUNTING

The Challenge

Addressing the shortage of healthcare workers.

The founders dabbled with the idea of building an app that will be able to shorten the process of prescription medication delivery as it currently requires a patient to visit a General Practitioner and then a pharmacy in order to fill their prescription and purchase a medicine that they need.

As it was in almost all countries, the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK surfaced a few issues that were not visible at a first glance before 2020. People suffered from a shortage of healthcare workers that could help with the increased workload and limited access to public medical services, especially for remote and/or underprivileged areas.

With these issues rising and their initial concept in mind, it was a high call for Sonny and Charles, and they contacted us in late 2020 to discuss their concepts for the product.

The founders had their niche market and a business plan ready to be implemented. They also wanted to build their product from scratch which meant that they - together with the team at Monterail - had to resolve a few different technical issues before starting product development.

Key challenges of the project included:

Educating potential customers so they can order prescriptions online and get their medications delivered.
Leveraging contact-less delivery service, with Scription’s main competitors dominating the physical pharmacy sector.
Great user experience for both patients who need their medications delivered quickly and pharmacists who have limited time for interactions and paperwork.

SCRIPTION APPLICATION SCREENSHOT

The Process

Web and mobile applications with tried-and-true technologies.

Once the scope of the initial works and the roadmap to MVP were established, core development could be carried out. The plan was to complete designs in 4–5 weeks starting September 2021 and then proceed with the implementation between October 2021 and March 2022 - all milestones targeted towards releasing an MVP for beta tests in April 2022 and then an alpha release in July 2022.

During the discussions with the founders, it was decided that we would build both a web and mobile application, with the Ionic framework used to develop the latter, Vue 3 as a framework for creating the web application, and Ruby on Rails as GraphQL API. With the requirement of building the app as promptly as possible and testing the founders’ business concept, these technologies turned out to be perfect for the job.

As mentioned, we completed the designs first in 2021 and then progressed with development in following months. As we were implementing the designs, legal regulations regarding issuing prescriptions were changed in the UK, so we had to adjust the user flow to accommodate the new rules. We redesigned the app and started developing an updated flow in just over 3 weeks.

This is how we made it happen:

Detailed planning for a 6-month roadmap that would get the team to the MVP release, with three applications developed in parallel.
Choosing optimal technologies and tools.
Developing a product in iterations that allowed the Scription team to test it right from the start and provide feedback.

Team’s voice

Marcin Szulc

Tech lead

Reliable but fast technologies

After initial discussions with the founders and a team of principal engineers at Monterail, we’ve decided to use technologies that are not only reliable, tested by our experts and modern, but also would help us move fast when it comes to building the app.

The Outcome

Patients can get a prescription and then their medications are delivered in less than 90 minutes.

In April 2022, we were able to launch an MVP with basic functionalities for online pharmacies, and in June 2022, we collected feedback from the app’s beta users to make adjustments to the product. The alpha version of the app was released later in July 2022. Patients can get a prescription and then their medications are delivered in less than 90 minutes. Pharmacies gain access to a new pool of potential customers and a steady stream of online orders.

The roadmap for further development includes video/chatbot consultations, delivery tracking, and live reviews on a pharmacy profile in Scription. We also drafted a plan for the Scription’s growth in Q3 2022 and beyond.

The success of this project hinged on the following factors:

Great communication workflow between the client and the project managers.
Agile approach to any challenges that were not outlined in the initial roadmap.
Engaged team that was able to spot any gaps and promptly address them.