Rebuilding a telehealth app for security and usability
Sole iOS developer on River Health, a telehealth product, rebuilding the app to protect patient privacy and keep clinician–patient communication reliable.
The problem
River Health is a telehealth platform connecting clinicians and patients. Two things are true of almost everything in that category: the privacy requirements are non-negotiable, and the people using it are often unwell, in a hurry, or unfamiliar with the app.
Those pressures pull against each other. Security work tends to add steps; patient usability demands fewer. Getting both right at once is the actual job.
There is a third constraint that is easy to underrate: uptime. If a clinician cannot reach a patient at the appointed time, the product has failed regardless of how well anything else works.
What I did
I was the sole iOS developer on the product, which meant owning the app end to end: architecture, delivery, releases and the App Store relationship.
- Rebuilt the app to protect patient privacy, in a domain where handling that data correctly is a requirement rather than a preference.
- Reworked the user experience so the product was navigable by patients under real conditions, not only by clinicians who use it daily.
- Maintained reliability for clinician–patient communication, the part of the product that has to work every time.
The outcome
A telehealth app that met a materially higher privacy bar and was easier for patients to actually use, maintained by one person across several years of platform changes.
Regulated products suit how I work. They reward people who have shipped through App Store review repeatedly and who treat privacy and data handling as design constraints from the beginning rather than as a compliance pass at the end.