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ContigoU

Tags
healthcare
engineering
product management
Description
When
Where
Oakland, CA
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ContigoU helps patients find skilled nursing rehab.
In late 2017 I was contracted to build out the MVP for a seed stage healthcare technology startup. The company was founded by a veteran of the healthcare industry, a discharge nurse who wanted to fix the problems she’d experienced first hand.

Market

Skilled Nursing Rehab is where you go after a stroke, car accident, or other debilitating health problem and after the hospital has you in a stable condition. Patients usually stay in skilled nursing for about a month.
Finding one of these facilities on your own is very difficult. Hospitals don’t give much help and information online is scattered. ContigoU solves these issues by providing a hotel-style search for skilled nursing rehab.
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Comparisons Page Screenshot

Product

Overview

I helped ContigoU develop their initial product and launch strategy. We narrowed down their original model of handling all discharge scenarios to focusing on just skilled nursing rehab, which in itself is still a multi-billion dollar industry.
I travelled with the founder up and down the Bay Area and interviewed dozens of patients, hospital administrators, and skilled nursing employees to discover what problems they faced and how we could help.

We found several pain points:

  1. Patients couldn’t find information about facilities
  1. Hospitals couldn’t get their patients out the door fast enough
  1. Skilled Nursing Facilities were struggling to reach patients
A listings website would sit right at the crux of these problems and help solve all three simultaneously.
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Listings Page Screenshot

Product Spec

I created a detailed product specification based on the requirements we identified, including mockups, examples of products with a similar UX in other verticals and a mood board. Using this document I coordinated with another freelancer to get the product designed and branded. After several iterations we arrived at a great looking MVP.

Transitioning

Once the MVP was ready for launch, I prepared a detailed document outlining the full technology and product stack to make it easy for any other experienced dev team to jump right in and get to work.

Engineering

Overview

For this project I handled both the product management side of things as well as the engineering implementation. My job was to both deeply understand the needs of the customer and to translate those needs into a working solution.

Stack

For this project I used a SERN stack (SQLite, Express, React, Node).
The website is currently deployed to a Digital Ocean Droplet running NGINX. UFW handles the firewall and restricts traffic to certain allowed ports. The web server is built in Node.js and the front-end framework is React.js.

Software used:

  • Sass for CSS styles.
  • Redux for managing state.
  • Webpack for building the React project and minifying files.
  • Babel for advanced JavaScript language features.
  • yarn for better package management.
  • SQLite for a straightforward database solution.
  • pm2 for better Node.js process management.
  • Various Google APIs

Thanks for reading 👋🏻
I’m also tweeting at @AnthonyCastrio and running a community for bootstrapped founders at Indie Worldwide where I make curated introductions between founders based on their revenue and goals.
See you there,
Anthony