Enhancing Operational Efficiency for a Clinical Imaging Solutions Provider: Overcoming Key Development Challenges

About the Client

Perceptive is a leading provider of imaging informatics solutions, specializing in tissue-to-human imaging, analysis, and data management for pharmaceutical and biotech clients. Their flagship software platforms, VivoQuant® and iPACS®, enable the processing, storing, and reporting of complex medical imaging data across various modalities. 

Despite their success, Perceptive faced operational inefficiencies and bottlenecks that hindered their ability to scale and innovate, particularly within their software development, infrastructure, UX/UI, and documentation processes.

Santex's Added Value

Santex began its collaboration with Perceptive by developing a stand-alone application, Supply Chain, for their Core Lab, marking the start of a fruitful partnership. 

Santex then led the discovery phase for LATTICE, Perceptive's diagnostic data platform, providing support across software development, infrastructure, and UX/UI design. 

Today, Santex continues to drive significant improvements by enhancing development processes, streamlining infrastructure, and refining user experiences, ultimately helping Perceptive deliver better, faster solutions to their clients.

The Challenge

Perceptive faced a range of challenges, including inefficiencies in software development, inconsistent infrastructure processes, poor user experience, and a lack of clear technical documentation. 

These issues included slow troubleshooting and bug management, outdated and inconsistent dependencies, complex codebases with inadequate documentation, unreliable QA processes, and infrequent releases. 

Additionally, the infrastructure environment lacked consistency across multiple platforms and cloud tenants, and the UX/UI was fragmented, resulting in usability issues. 

The existing documentation system was cumbersome, leading to inconsistencies and maintenance challenges.

The Solution

Santex provided a holistic solution, addressing both immediate issues and long-term improvements across multiple operational areas.

Santex improved the software development process by streamlining dependency management, implementing automated testing, and optimizing the troubleshooting and bug tracking processes. The team also conducted research and documentation to clarify complex features and enhance internal knowledge sharing. By integrating continuous integration (CI) with GitHub Actions, Santex accelerated build processes and allowed for more frequent releases.

Santex also modernized Perceptive’s infrastructure by migrating to GitHub Actions for continuous deployment and implementing Infrastructure as Code using AWS Account Factory for Terraform. This standardized environments, improved cloud management, and ensured better visibility through Datadog for monitoring system performance and addressing issues more efficiently.

In the UX/UI design area, a scalable UI Kit was created to standardize design elements, improving consistency across the platform. Santex also conducted UX audits, usability testing, and accessibility improvements to ensure a more intuitive, user-centered design. Ongoing collaboration with stakeholders ensured that new features aligned with both user needs and business goals.

Finally, Santex revamped existing user documentation, introducing a Docs-as-Code approach to streamline the documentation process. This improved scalability, accuracy, and accessibility, while ensuring that documentation was updated continuously alongside product development.

The Outcome

Santex’s contributions enabled Perceptive to dramatically improve its operational efficiency.

The reporting tool improved by the Software Development team became more effective for troubleshooting, and VCPKG streamlined dependency management. The codebase became more maintainable through improved documentation, and a more structured approach to bug management significantly reduced technical debt. Automated testing and faster release cycles allowed Perceptive to deliver more frequent updates, increasing release frequency to three times a year.

The DevOps team benefited from standardized environments, improved cloud management, and streamlined deployment pipelines. Monitoring and observability were enhanced, allowing for better performance tracking and faster issue resolution.

The creation of a reusable UI Kit and a full redesign of key features improved usability and user satisfaction. Accessibility was greatly improved, ensuring compliance with WCAG standards, while new feature designs were aligned with both business objectives and user needs.

Both internal and external documentation is now scalable, user-friendly, and aligned with ongoing development. The documentation approach proposed and implemented by Santex reduced operational costs and improved consistency across product releases.

Through Santex's contributions, Perceptive now enjoys a more efficient development cycle, reduced operational bottlenecks, and enhanced product delivery. All of this positions Perceptive for continued growth and success in the competitive medical imaging market.