HIGHLIGHTS McKesson expects to reuse between 90-95% of the code between the iOS and Android versions of the app.

A small team with minimal mobile experience built a release-ready app in five months using existing .NET and C# skills.

New features will support better experiences for patients and more cost-effective operations for physicians.

CASE STUDY

McKesson delivers high-value mobile capabilities for physicians and patients

About McKesson

Founded in 1833, McKesson is the oldest and largest healthcare services company in the U.S. In addition to being the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America, the company provides healthcare technology solutions that support better care, lower costs, and greater efficiency. McKesson employs over 37,000 people and in 2014 recorded a revenue of $137.6 billion. The company’s Medisoft and Lytec practice management

software solutions help independent physician practices streamline scheduling and billing to manage the increasingly complex and ever-changing healthcare payment process.

Mobile practice management supports better care

Rapid, efficient development with Xamarin

Medical staff are inherently mobile within their practice, often spanning multiple practice locations as well as hospital rotations. Delivering more efficient care on the go is made possible through smartphones and tablets if the apps running on them are secure, fast, and have a user experience optimized for mobile healthcare. McKesson jumped on the opportunity to provide a high-quality, feature-rich mobile experience for users of its Medisoft and Lytec practice management solutions—including physicians, staff, and patients—as a competitive differentiator and key to the long-term success of the products.

McKesson created their first iOS app in 2013. Once the app was in use, McKesson listened closely to customer feedback. While the first version of the app enabled

The team responsible for developing the practice management mobile apps was already familiar with Xamarin, having used it to develop the first version of the mobile app. For the next version, they decided to explore Xamarin.Forms. “Xamarin.Forms enables us to target Android and iOS simultaneously. After a successful proof of concept, we decided to go that route rather than building a separate Android app. Building both apps in one shot was a very efficient

doctors to view patient information and enter charges based on billing codes, they couldn’t add new patients on a mobile device, requiring walk-ins to be processed through the front desk or a PC. “We discovered that physicians wanted the ability to add patients to the practice management database from the mobile app,” says Wayne Akins, Software Architect for McKesson Provider Technologies.!McKesson also decided to add patient check-in capabilities to the app so patients could fill out intake forms electronically using a tablet in the doctors’ offices. Existing patients who hadn’t visited recently would only have to verify pre-populated information on the electronic forms. The information would then be synced with the desktop Medisoft or Lytec app to reduce data entry time for staff, improve accuracy, and provide a better patient experience.

way to do things,” says Alan Zeh, Director of Engineering at Practice Choice.

The total development time from design to release was about five months with a team of eight developers and four QA professionals. “We were able to build the Android and iOS versions of the app simultaneously. The developers did unit testing on both platforms throughout the process,” says Akins.

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Alan Zeh, Director of Engineering, Practice Choice, McKesson

We expect to reuse 90% to 95% of the code between the Android and iOS versions, which obviously saves us a lot of time and money.”

The team was able to bring forward some of the server side code from the existing version of the mobile app, but where they really plan to leverage Xamarin’s code-reuse capabilities is in targeting iOS and Android. “The first version of the 2.0 product supports iOS 7 and 8. We’ll be releasing the Android version soon. Thanks to Xamarin.Forms, we expect to reuse 90-95% of the code between the Android and iOS versions, which will save us a lot of time and money, ” says Zeh.

When we started this project,” says Akins, “the initial pilot version was on GitHub, which didn’t fit well with our day-to-day workflow. For our work on the main product line, we use Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). Xamarin provides target files for Microsoft Visual Studio, so we used those as a basis to build automation and targets. Our whole codebase can live on TFS, and our developers and QA experts can use it for workflows, feature management, and defect tracking. It was really a good fit.“

Software Architect at McKesson. “We didn’t have to learn Java, how iOS startups happen, all the technical details of each platform. Our team doesn’t even specialize in mobile development generally, and Xamarin made it possible for us to create a high-quality experience for our physicians across both platforms.”

Code reuse saves time and money when targeting multiple platforms

Flexible workflow and management options support existing infrastructure

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New features built quickly and easily using existing skills

The team built the customer-requested features into both mobile apps as part of the development effort. The functionality has been well-received by customers and has helped to increase upgrade rates for Medisoft and Lytec. “If a similar shop came to us and asked about our experience, we’d say Xamarin really saved us time,” says Doug Stevens,

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