Case study: Bad Dinosaur
Challenge
Bad Dinosaur, an app development company based in Scotland has a range of clients who require data driven apps for various usage scenarios. These apps are technically complex application integrations with various types of data. Bad Dinosaur regularly get asked to integrate applications with data sources that are complex, hard to access and surrounded by compliance issues, such as health and patient records. Digi.me provided consented access to a variety of data sources for Bad Dinosaurs client projects. A recent example can be found in the Acorn Pharmacy app.
In order to work with these data types there are long learning curves and complex processes for being able understand and access these data types. Not only does this challenge development houses, there can also be lead times on the compliance processes.
The process and learning curve of trying to implement an independent solution to add new data sources would increase costs and timescales for clients, especially when it comes to unknown / undocumented features and quirks of complex data integrations. The digi.me platform enables businesses to save valuable developer resources and time with very little cost in terms of training and learning the platform.
Approach
Digi.me provides Bad Dinosaur with a single interface to access hundreds of data sources that would be beyond the reach of many of their smaller clients. Beyond the basics of digi.me saving them the time, cost and complexity that other business solutions would.
Bad Dinosaur have found the digi.me technical support second to none. Digi.me have provided technical expertise and knowledge with that of Bad Dinosaur and their clients to develop and build a solution together that meets the needs of the client.
Ultimately Bad Dinosaur and their clients are an important part of the digi.me app ecosystem and in order for digi.me to be successful everyone has to understand what the client is trying to achieve. Digi.me support this by offering the best possible solution to data access and privacy challenges. This was done via the Private Sharing SDK, through sharing knowledge and providing approaches to testing and application distribution. The success of the client and our partners ultimately leads to success for everyone.
This ecosystem driven approach resulted in a uniquely beneficial experience for BadDinosaur and exceeded their clients expectations.
Solution
The most recent application developed by Bad Dinosaur on the digi.me platform is the Acorn Pharmacy platform. Digi.me provides a range of SDK’s and will be expanding theseover time. Digi.me worked with Bad Dinosaur to help them port the JavaScript SDK to C#.
Bad Dinosaur are a primarily Microsoft.Net focused company and as such by porting theSDK to C# they are now able to offer the full range of digi.me data sources to all future clients. Bad Dinosaur continues to work closely with the digi.me team to ensure direct matches between all function calls and outputs including encryption and consent access.This approach ensures a broad and growing range of data sources and opens up solutions ona global scale whilst still ensuring consent, security and personal data privacy throughout.
Bad Dinosaur chose digi.me as their solution provider as digi.me are reliable, easy to use and faster to develop with, than going directly to multiple data sources (in particular medical records). They can use the same tools generated for this application and build this functionality into any other client apps as a solution feature. This takes away the pain for the client of consented data sharing. It also enables a broader range of data solution offerings. As the digi.me data sets grow as does Bad Dinosaurs capabilities and their offering to their clients. Over time this reusable solution opens up options for other apps to access more data and new markets.
Digi.me is engineered from the ground up with privacy and security at its heart which help salleviate concerns, giving confidence to business and developers that they can access richdata in a consented and compliant manner. The ethical data principles of the digi.me platformcreate a moment of epiphany as the customers don’t know a better way to resolve these issues and they are often a point of concern and result in product owners struggling to find solutions. These are baked into digi.me as standard.
Benefits/ Outcomes
Digi.me provides a privacy centric framework and approach to personal data sharing andmanagement. The framework provided by digi.me can be mirrored into the product and company who own the app and provide a great way to accelerate data and build new trusted relationships with individuals which meet the requirements and simplify GDPR compliance.
The approach saves time, cost and the speed and complexity of delivering an app to a clientis significantly reduced. This provides Bad Dinosaur with solutions that are more accessible to a broader range of customers including start-ups. This kind of solution had previously only been accessible to enterprise level customers with much larger budgets.
More details on the Acorn Pharmacy app by Bad Dinosaur visit the website.
Orginal insight published on Digi.me's website here.
Katherine Holden
Katherine joined techUK in May 2018 and currently leads the Data Analytics, AI and Digital ID programme.