Veterinary Wound Library

Overview

The Veterinary Wound Library (VWL) is a membership based resource that is dedicated to helping Vets, Techs, and Nurses better manage their patients wounds. They offer several services, including online training, case support, and a growing library of educational content.

I worked with VWL to improve their case support service. Their existing solution was a very manual process that required customers and specialists to email back and forth, and depended on several third party integrations.

VWL gave me a great spec explaining what they needed, but I was left in charge of many design decisions. They were very welcoming of my ideas, and I think the end product speaks volumes to the collaborative/iterative approach.

I integrated a unified case support system into their existing Laravel site. The case support area is for both customers and specialists to manage their opened/assigned cases.

I helped come up with a system that would allow any user to easily find the case they're interested in, and quickly post questions, and see historic correspondence.

As well as the web app, I also built a corresponding React Native application for both iOS and Android. It provides the same functionality as the website, but allows users to correspond on cases when they're on the move.

Tech Details

All of this work was done with Laravel & React. The mobile app was built with React Native, so a lot of the Typescript code was shared between the projects.

VWL were already using Laravel for their existing site, so the backend for the case support system was built into that. I liaised with their in-house dev, and we decided that we should also rebuild their existing static "member area" with a React version, for easier integration with other tools they plan to build in the future.

State management for the case support system was done using Redux, which made sense for this system as there was a lot of relational data to render out, and lots of navigating around—having stuff cached makes the experience much snappier. Using Redux made it easy to implement live updates, so whenever any changes are made to the backend, the frontend reflects that nearly immediately, without the need to reload the page. This works in the app, too!

All the case responses go through Laravels event/notification systems, so we enabled push notifications and/or email alerts for certain events.

Conclusion

This was a really interesting project to work on, and it was a lot of fun coming up with ideas and designs to get it completed. I'd happily work with VWL again, and believe they'd say the same about me!