Rana Dutta - Select Projects

Healthcare is one of the most significant issues facing the USA and many other countries around the World. A combination of population growth, an aging population, new diseases, economic pressures, and litigous attitudes, has resulted in an overwhelming price to receive quality healthcare. However, as with most challenges, there also comes opportunity. My Health, Inc. hopes to leverage the expertise of healthcare providers and integrate software and telecommunication technologies to improve knowledge of various health realted topics and provide tools to allow healthcare professionals to communicate more simply and efficiently among each other.

As one component to this solution, My Health, Inc. needed to develop a health care portal that doctors, dieticians, and other health care experts could use to publish medical articles, diet and nutrition advise, and other health related information. The site needed to be organized in a clear and organized fasion and be aesthetically pleasing.

Leveraging my ability to pick up new technologies, I emmersed myself to learning the Python programming language along with a web development framework called Django. These were the software technologies already chosen and utilized to develop an initial health care information portal. Within just two weeks, I was able to apply my learnings and began making contributions to improving the site. Specifically, I was responsible for creating and implementing a new layout, adding recaptcha functionality, embedding Amazon product purchasing functionality and implementing a variety of other feature enhancements. As a result, viewership of the site increased more than three-fold. For more information, please visit the HealthConduit® website.

A second element to the My Health strategy is to improve communications among healthcare providers, patients and family. Doctors and healthcare providers struggle with being available to their colleagues and patients while also preserving their privacy.

So, My Health, Inc has conceived of a new web application called DoctorCom® which addresses this issue by integrating a Software as a Service (SaaS) architecture along with web-based telecommunications and smart phone technologies to provide a simple and easy-to-use messaging system offering cellular, text messaging, and paging communications. As this product continues to evolve, additional capabilites are being developed to further improve communications and reduce costs.

Currently, I am responsible for the entire user interface of the DoctorCom® web application. Using open source technology, I developed the graphical elements to the application, and implemented the design and layout for the application. As many users prefer to access DoctorCom® via their smartphones, I implemented a solution which serves light weight pages for mobile users. This dramatically improved response times and adoption rates for the application. Additional information can be found at the DoctorCom® website.

It is hard to believe that most email systems in use today are based on a standard that was developed nearly 40 years ago when the Internet was just barely in its infancy. The email technology known as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP, was developed when there were very few connections on the Internet and very few users. Unfortunately, capabilities such as encryption, authentication and privacy, had not been specified in the SMTP standard. So, emails are still trasmitted today as human readable text and accessible to anyone who can probe into the Internet.

Encryption technolgies do exist to encrypt email. However, many of these solutions are complicated requiring IT and security experts to install and configure or is implemented in a way that is complicated and difficult to use. And most solutions are geared toward securing email communications within the enterprise, but do not allow secure messaging outside of the company. ScramblerMail™'s mission is to provide small companies with a simple and easy-to-use Software as a Service (SaaS) encrypted email solution.

My contribution was to translate the CEO's vision into a robust, reliable, high quality, secure email web application in just 11 months. Working with the founders and developers, I established a development process, tools, and Quality Assurance (QA) plan to design, code, test and deploy the ASP.Net/C# platform. Additionally, I owned the production infrastructure deployment which entailed contracting with a collocation hosting company and purchasing and setup of firewall, routers, and servers. I also supported the CEO in making presentations to investors and customers. Additional information can be found at the ScramblerMail™ website.