Vermonster

Vermonster was contracted by a publishing firm to develop chatbots for Slack and Facebook Messenger. The company was seeking innovative ways to distribute their content and decided to experiment with chatbots. The Vermonster team conducted research to determine user interaction with the bot, wrote scripts based on the results, and built the bot in collaboration with the in-house UX designers and developers. The Slack bot was launched in September 2016 and was deemed successful, leading to the development of a similar chatbot for Facebook Messenger. The relationship between the publishing firm and Vermonster is ongoing, with the latter providing continuous improvements and maintenance for both bots.

In another project, Vermonster was hired to develop guidelines for an authoring platform, a point-of-care web service, and an application for a company that creates clinical decision support tools. The goal of the project was to make 20% of cancer treatment decisions evidence-based and 10% value-based. The platform developed by Vermonster uses CDS Hooks to launch an app from the physician medication order screen. The app collects patient data from the electronic health record and passes it to an AI engine which suggests evidence-based therapy options. The team from Vermonster varied from 4–8 developers, designers, and key health informatics architects.

Vermonster also worked with Boston University’s School of Medicine to develop a web learning platform for university students. The platform was designed to provide students with a note-taking tool to log their learning experiences. Vermonster was involved in the initial design process and handled all backend development. The platform features a learning portfolio, a community feed, and a heat map to visualize where learning is happening. The web platform was launched in August 2016.