Nitobi Delivers Sosido, The Ultimate Platform for ‘Healthy’ Communication

Sosido Networks Co-Founder and CEO, Tanis Steward, says she came to Nitobi a technology newbie. She might not have known Ajax from Merb, but she had big plans for an online collaboration platform for professional health care associations and their members. After more than a decade working with various health care associations, Tanis believed there had to be a better way for medical personnel to share information and have conversations that could lead to breakthroughs in health care research, delivery and outcomes. Enter Sosido.

“Health care associations are operating in the 1980’s with paper newsletters and static, stale websites,” says Tanis. “But, with younger members flooding the associations, there’s a groundswell in favor of using modern technology. I wanted to be a part of creating community where there wasn’t one before, making real impact in a positive way on the delivery of patient care and on patient outcomes.”

Using the social networking structure of Linked-In as inspiration, Nitobi designed and built Sosido. Like Linked-In, users can set up and manage professional profiles on Sosido. The Sosido Briefing Page is the ‘nerve center’ for information where members receive daily announcements and notifications from associations they belong to; read news feeds they’ve subscribed to; keep in contact with colleagues; keep an eye on industry news and events; and discuss research issues, documents and reports.

Nitobi’s User Experience (UX) professionals worked closely with Tanis to determine how user interactions on the site could support key business goals. Before Nitobi touched the code, the UX team engaged in extensive content and business analysis to devise the best approach for structuring the site’s information. Then they designed the interaction elements for delivering that information to users. Some requirements, like enabling discussion around documents uploaded by other users or medical associations, added complexity to the application.

In an effort to streamline Sosido’s development, Nitobi chose Merb as the development platform. Merb is a new open source web framework written in Ruby. It’s known for being light and flexible and handling JavaScript more elegantly than Rails.

“We were able to get the Sosido project done on time with Merb without pain,” said Joe Bowser, lead developer.

“I commend Nitobi on educating me about the development cycle,” says Tanis. During the process, Nitobi occasionally ‘pushed back’ on some ideas, not wanting to waste Tanis’ resources investing in bells and whistles before doing real-world user testing–something Tanis found helpful in the end. “It was a big project so it was difficult to prioritize, but I’m pleased with how Nitobi managed the process and where we’ve ended up.”

“Nitobi captured the essence of what we were trying to do with Sosido and successfully brought us to our first business milestone,” said Tanis. “Now we can work with our members to demonstrate how valuable this is in the real world.” With a number of associations already lined up for beta, Tanis is excited to see the potential of Sosido unfold.