ARKRAY case study: Revamping a diabetes management platform

ARKRAY develops diabetes testing and management products that support both patients and the healthcare providers they trust with their care. The company worked with a previous partner to build its diabetes management system (DMS) but was unsatisfied with the results because the system was full of bugs, many of which were hindering the success of the entire platform. The client kicked off an RFP process to find a new partner.

ARKRAY’s DMS is split between three distinct products: a web-based provider platform called ARK Care Advance, a patient-facing iOS and Android application called ARK Care VITA, and an uploader application to download glucose readings via USB. When ARKRAY first came to us, all three relied on outdated technology and desperately needed rearchitecting. We also focused on redesigning the user experience of both ARK Care Advance and ARK Care VITA.

We rearchitected ARKRAY’s DMS on a .NET back-end using several Microsoft technologies like SQL and Azure. For the ARK Care Advance web portal’s front-end, we used ASP.NET. We built both the iOS and Android versions of ARK Care VITA natively.

Before we could focus on the new and improved ARK Care platforms, we needed first to debug and stabilize the current iterations so ARKRAY’s network of users could still rely on them. We got to work immediately and had updates rolled out within six months. From there, we began rethinking the future state of ARKRAY’s DMS platform. Our continuation engineering team provided support to ARKRAY’s legacy DMS product to keep it running smoothly and implement changes as needed.

Before winning the RFP, we held several in-depth sessions with ARKRAY to unpack how we would work together. In these sessions, we ran through some exercises around vision workshopping, feature prioritization, and our overall approach. The findings from these sessions then allowed us to design a comprehensive plan for how we would undertake our future design work.

Throughout several design workshop sessions, we conducted interviews with certified diabetes educators. These interviews were incredibly informative and highlighted many of the challenges diabetes patients have when managing their own care. This information proved very helpful in designing ARK Care VITA as we built our findings into the app’s experience. We held several working sessions with ARKRAY over about a week in Bulgaria. Not only did this allow our team and theirs to meet face-to-face, but it also further fostered collaboration between our two teams.