Effortless coordination

How to manage information in a team setting

The first of many steps towards the implementation of Healthica Pro was installed today. The platform now has a structural ability to create teams. (We refer to them internally as “client groups”.) The concept is pretty straightforward — we can now group N + 1 users into a virtual group that shares access to all of the group's listings and requests, but each user can maintain their own channels and notifications.

The separation of channels from listings/requests is actually pretty important. You might be a specialist in one modalility (say X-Ray), while a colleague is a specialist in BioMedical. With this separation, you can keep tabs on X-Ray channels, but, when needed, you can help manage items that your colleague in Biomedical is normally taking care of.

The management of marketplace items is fundamental to getting value out of Healthica, so we spent most of our time recently doing this “rewiring” of the entire marketplace API, so we can bind a set of users together in a client group. When a group member runs their searches in default mode, they are seeing only their specified interests, but if the user pulls up listings or requests, they see everything owned by the team as a whole.

This concept also makes it possible to avoid posting your new items to other users in your team regardless of the channels involved. If you have two (or more) team members handling GE Ultrasound Parts, and one of you makes a request for a part, no one else on the team will get an alert.

This is seriously useful. I am involved with a three user team on Healthica, and, since we post as many as 40-50 requests a day from our operation at mrictpetparts.com, two out of us three were getting all these notices that we were already aware of, because they originated from our own group.

One side note: we started using the “private notes” field to store basic notes like the client's name, when to contact them again, etc. This field is not accessible if you don't own the request or listing, so it's secure, and a good place to leave notes that tell your colleagues what to do if you are not around for some reason.

This was a pretty major upgrade, but because, for the most part, the changes were on the backend (and not visible), we did not make any announcements while working on it. The update is now fully online in v2.7.9, and seems to have worked out well.

Clark Wilkins, Simplexable 2022.06.07