Ingenious

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an associate professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, but at the time of my engagement with Ingenious, I had just transitioned jobs. I was previously at Weill Cornell Medical College. In both institutions, though, I am a research faculty member.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ingenious?

I was developing a web-based application that could help patients with advanced illnesses plan their end-of-life care arrangements and connect with their loved ones. I hired Ingenious to help me with the development. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ingenious built out the entire platform in terms of the design elements and the interactive prototype functionality. I equipped them with all the materials that would be on the web-based app, including animated video content which are educational in nature. 

There is a feature within the app that is sort of like a guided decision aid tool. I had all of the questions, answers, choices, and responses designed specifically to autofill PDF versions of legal documents that patients would need to have in hand. It was also designed in a way that a document could be accomplished by a healthcare proxy or a legal decision-maker for a patient. 

What is the team composition?

I interacted with the CEO of Ingenious to scope out the work and to address higher-level issues. My most frequent points of contact, however, were two individuals. There were about five people, all in all, who were working on the project, and this included a graphic designer, web developers, and a project lead. 

How did you come to work with Ingenious?

A colleague of mine from the University of Colorado Medical School referred Ingenious because they had a positive experience working with them. I saw that they had partnered on a similar project and that Ingenious had experience working in an academic medical setting, creating patient-facing tools under grant-funded and highly regulated environments, so I decided to work with them. 

I also liked that Ingenious had a guided and standardized development process that would be beneficial to someone who’s new to it. That, along with their competitive pricing, was also a driving force behind my decision.

How much have you invested with them?

Thus far, we’ve spent $55,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began the project in September 2020 and it is still ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We are still in the development phase so we haven’t had the chance to utilize the product with patients. I have very limited quantitative feedback, but I will say that Ingenious is carrying out a good timeline. Everything is being done very thoroughly and the team is very responsive to my feedback. The main metrics I have right now are simply with the infrastructure and prototype being in place. 

How did Ingenious perform from a project management standpoint?

We don’t use a ton of specialized tools; we simply have a Slack channel in place that we use occasionally. We also touch base biweekly through video conferencing, and it is extraordinarily helpful and consistent. They’re able to gather the whole team for these meetings, which are our primary form of communication. Between that time, we exchange emails or, if there’s a need to have something handled quickly, hop on a brief phone call. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most distinguishing aspect of Ingenious’s services is their helpful creative input. There were times when I wasn’t certain what design or functionality features to introduce into the app, but they were thoughtful enough to recommend options that I hadn’t even thought of.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The biggest point of improvement could be on the communication. There was one instance when certain aspects of the design were miscommunicated and we ended up with a final product that missed some key elements that were outlined in the original proposal. I learned a lot from the experience as well and to their credit, Ingenious still found a workaround. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Don’t hesitate to push back with the recommended changes that Ingenious will present. They’re very open-minded and quick to have a collaborative brainstorming session to accommodate your recommendations or concerns.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the project director for a public health school.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ingenious?

We needed someone to develop a mobile app to help us conduct a research study.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ingenious created a mobile app for iOS and Android. The app was aimed at preventing alcohol-exposed pregnancy among indigenous women in the US. It contained the curriculum that we designed for our study. Users can log in to access the modules, watch related videos, ask questions, and so on.

What is the team composition?

I regularly interacted with the project manager and another teammate. Kevin (Business Development Manager) was also instrumental in some project phases.

How did you come to work with Ingenious?

A faculty member who previously worked with Ingenious highly recommended them.

How much have you invested with them?

The project cost $85,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from January–August 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Ingenious delivered a good quality app, and we had no complaints about their work. We’re still working on some things, so we haven’t launched it yet. Even though the engagement is finished, they’ve continued to respond to us and resolved numerous issues for us.

How did Ingenious perform from a project management standpoint?

They performed well and were highly responsive. We had biweekly Zoom meetings and communicated via Slack. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Ingenious went above and beyond to please us. Every teammate I encountered was helpful and receptive to our concerns and needs.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be fruitful for them to keep in mind that their clients may not have an extensive understanding of technology, app design, and so on. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Let them know if you have a limited understanding of technology and app development.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a pediatric gastroenterologist and clinical researcher at a children's hospital. My work involves doing clinical research, health services research, and more.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ingenious?

I hired Ingenious to develop a mobile health app in order to improve the way teenagers take their medications.

What was the scope of their involvement?

My work with Ingenious will benefit liver transplant recipients. I’ve chosen to pursue building such an app because if teenagers don’t take their daily medicines for their liver transplant, they’re at risk of losing it. In addition, they can experience a lot of complications or even death. 

As a physical and health services researcher, I’m focused on treatment adherence. There’s a lot of research into why teenagers don’t take their medicines, but not a lot of effective interventions to solve the problem.

The team has been involved since the pre-planning phases of our mobile health app. They’ve helped us identify what can be best for our external stakeholders. Currently, they’ve completed our basic app and we’ve tested it as a research group. We also have a manuscript published because of that. On top of that, we plan to test it with patients soon.

What is the team composition?

We’ve had two main points of contact from Ingenious during the pre-planning phases. Then, there are at least 4–5 people who are part of the development phase, including their chief innovation officer.

How did you come to work with Ingenious?

I found Ingenious through my work with the university. Their team worked with multiple health services researchers before. Since my work focused on the psychosocial aspects of taking medicine, I knew that they were the right fit because they had worked for the same industry before.

How much have you invested with them?

We received a grant to develop the app from a liver disease association. I’m not sure how much money has been paid to Ingenious, but we’ve probably spent $50,000–$200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2018, and our collaboration is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

The biggest metric that we can have is whether our work has been published in a medical journal. In connection with that, we’ve recently published our work in a medical journal. However, we haven’t released it for public use yet because we have ongoing work.

How did Ingenious perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate through email and video meetings. Ingenious has been great, and they’ve been responsive. On top of that, they’re open to feedback and have been very savvy in working with the medical community. Overall, we have a good partnership.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve done a lot of work in the medical arena which makes them capable of understanding the digital healthcare nuances.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they’ve been very timely. I don’t really have much to say about areas they can improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be very open to sharing your knowledge during the engagement. If you’re talking to a medical provider or a health services researcher, they can understand a lot of medical lingos that you’ll share. However, if you’re working with a development company, that may not be the case.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for a university as an assistant professor in the area of physical therapy research.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ingenious?

We were trying to develop a web app to help people after a total knee replacement surgery.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We developed some data science tools on the research end that we were interested in integrating into a web app — this is what people can use to understand their recovery after their knee surgery. Our particular challenge was taking all of the analytical work we had done, and operationalizing it in a way that could be used. This involves creating a UI and developing some infrastructure that could query the analytics that we developed, and then displaying the results for people.

Prior to working with Ingenious, we wanted to bring our academic research to clinicians and patients. However, we discovered early on in our process that it wasn’t possible, so we started looking for developers who could help us with this. Our goal wasn’t just to get information and analytics to people, but to get it to them in a way that could be used meaningfully.

The first phase was the academic work that we did, the second phase was to develop a prototype of what we were envisioning — which we can use to engage with our stakeholders continuously, to acquire feedback and criticism to make some iterative improvements on the web app. Moreover, they built a backend server to link up with our statistical analysis work on Ruby on Rails, and worked on the frontend using React JS.

We’re currently in a phase where we refine and improve upon the prototype, that we can ultimately launch into a larger study.

What is the team composition?

It evolved over time, but we work with one main contact who’s our project lead. We also work primarily with one of the senior program developers, but they also have other team members that we work with as well. I’d say the total number of people that we work with at Ingenious is a dozen, but we closely work with about six of them throughout the project.

There’s a project coordinator, a graphic designer, a number of programmers and software engineers, and their management team.

How did you come to work with Ingenious?

The CEO of their company gave a talk at the university I was working at and what they do just struck me. They view the software as a means to an end of changing and influencing behaviors in intentional ways, so that’s why we chose to engage with them.

Moreover, they were very easy to work with, and they were happy to meet with us and talk through the plan and processes. Their method of working, which is in sprints, has a series of deliverables that was very appealing to us. We knew that we were going to develop a prototype that needed to be refined, and it was exactly aligned with how they envision the work.

How much have you invested with them?

If I could give a range, our investment so far would be somewhere between $50,000–$100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing partnership started in October 2018.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I have nothing but good things to say about working with Ingenious. There’s a layer of bureaucracy between me and their team that we have to navigate, and they’re always helping us make sure that my institution is getting the information they need to approve the work.

We’re constantly working within our team to test what they’re developing and put it in front of our stakeholders to have their feedback on it. I would say that we’ve had a lot of really critical and positive feedback, and achieved a lot of what we were hoping to achieve in terms of informing people of their recovery.

How did Ingenious perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management is excellent and transparent. We typically communicate through email, Slack, and Google Hangouts. Ingenious also uses Jira to organize some of the efforts going on in the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I would also say that they’re very goal-oriented and easy to work with not just in creating a web app, but to create a tool for people that can achieve the clinical outcomes we’re looking for.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Honestly, if there were any issues in the process, it would probably be more on our end than theirs. They spend time upfront on product design, fixing bugs, making small enhancements, and maintaining the project at probably no cost. I think it all comes back to them being goal-oriented and the work they do is a means to an end in achieving the goals.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I’m going to sound like a broken record, but it’s important to be equally goal-oriented with Ingenious. You’re not just hiring them for a service, you’re actually partnering with them to figure out your goals and what you’re going to achieve with the project. To be true partners in the work, you also have to give them the freedom to make suggestions to improve the development.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of product for a fertility platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ingenious?

We wanted to build an electronic medical records system from scratch.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The application was built using Ruby on Rails for the backend and Ember.js on the frontend, with a MySQL database. It’s hosted on AWS. 

What is the team composition? 

We’ve worked with at least ten developers over the course of the engagement. However, we typically work with four. 

How did you come to work with Ingenious?

When I came onto the team, Ingenious had already been hired. 

How much have you invested with them?

[Confidential cost information].

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2016, and our engagement is ongoing. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve been able to create a platform and bring on paying customers. Currently, there are about 60,000 patients in the database. The amount of data we’ve gathered is a clear sign of success. 

How did Ingenious perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re definitely one of the best teams I’ve worked with in terms of communication and approach to development. The team members are native-Spanish speakers, but their English is perfect. They’re reliable. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re able to find high-quality developers when we’ve needed to expand the tea. We’ve worked well together. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Like with anything, you need to keep reminding people of certain things and remain diligent about expectations. However, I don’t see any weaknesses with the team per se.