About Higi

Higi is a digital health company that operates a network of health stations — self-service kiosks located in pharmacies and retail locations across the United States — that allow consumers to measure and track their vital signs, including blood pressure, pulse, weight, and body mass index (BMI). Higi's mission is to make health monitoring accessible to everyone, particularly the millions of Americans who lack regular access to preventive healthcare services.

Higi's health station network generates an enormous volume of consumer health data — billions of measurements from millions of users across tens of thousands of station locations. This data has significant potential value for healthcare providers, payers, and public health researchers seeking to understand population health trends and identify individuals at risk for chronic conditions.

Higi engaged Deerhold to build a smart healthcare platform — a web application that would enable healthcare providers and care management organizations to access and act on Higi's health station data as part of a comprehensive patient management workflow.

Deerhold's Role

Deerhold served as the primary software development partner for the Higi provider platform, taking responsibility for the full-stack development of the web application — from the data integration layer and back-end APIs to the front-end user interface and the analytics and reporting capabilities.

Deerhold's work on the Higi platform included:

1. Provider Portal Development: Design and development of the provider-facing web portal, which enabled care managers, nurses, and physicians to view their patients' Higi health station measurement histories, track trends over time, and identify patients who had recently recorded abnormal readings and might benefit from outreach.
2. Patient Risk Stratification: Development of a risk stratification engine that analyzed patients' Higi measurement histories — along with claims data and other clinical data sources provided by partner health plans — to identify patients at elevated risk for hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, and to prioritize them for care management outreach.
3. Care Management Workflow Tools: Development of workflow tools that enabled care managers to document outreach activities, track the outcomes of care management interventions, and measure the impact of the program on patient health metrics over time.
4. EHR Integration: Development of integrations with major EHR platforms — including Epic and Cerner — enabling Higi measurement data to flow directly into the patient record and appear in the clinician's existing workflow without requiring a separate login to the Higi portal.
5. Analytics and Reporting: Development of an analytics and reporting layer that enabled health plan and provider organization clients to measure the performance of their care management programs — including patient engagement rates, measurement compliance, and clinical outcome metrics.

Software Development Challenges

The Higi provider platform presented Deerhold's development team with several significant challenges:

1. Data Scale and Performance: Higi's health station network generates billions of measurements from millions of users. Providing fast, responsive access to this data for provider portal users — including complex queries across large patient populations — required careful attention to database design, indexing, caching, and query optimization. Deerhold designed a tiered data architecture that separated the raw measurement data store from the provider-facing query layer, using materialized views and pre-computed analytics to deliver sub-second response times for the most common provider portal queries.
2. Multi-Tenant Security and Privacy: The Higi provider platform served multiple health plan and provider organization clients, each of which had access only to their own enrolled patients' data. Ensuring strict data isolation between tenants — while still enabling the cross-tenant analytics needed for population health reporting — required a carefully designed multi-tenancy architecture and rigorous access control enforcement at every layer of the stack.
3. EHR Integration Complexity: Integrating with major EHR platforms is notoriously challenging due to the complexity and variability of EHR APIs and data models. Deerhold invested significant effort in building robust, well-tested EHR integration connectors and in designing an abstraction layer that isolated the rest of the platform from EHR-specific implementation details — enabling new EHR integrations to be added with minimal impact on the core platform.
4. HIPAA Compliance: As a platform handling protected health information (PHI) on behalf of covered entities and business associates, the Higi provider platform was subject to HIPAA technical safeguard requirements. Deerhold implemented comprehensive security controls — including end-to-end encryption, role-based access control, audit logging, and regular penetration testing — and worked with Higi's legal and compliance team to document the platform's HIPAA compliance posture.