Profile by Sanford Health

Profile was working with mobile apps built using Xamarin, a cross-platform tool where code is written once then deployed to both iOS and Android, for nearly 7 years. The apps regularly didn’t function as Profile and its membership base wanted them to and averaged well under 3-star reviews on the App Store and Google Play Store.

To create a better mobile experience for their members, Profile needed full-time development resources to redesign the apps natively for iOS and Android.

“We did a poor job of maintaining the apps and keeping them current," said Eric Aasheim, Chief Technology Officer of Profile by Sanford Health. "It was bad, and we knew it. We let them sit long enough that it wasn’t worth fixing, and we knew we had to start from scratch with a clean slate for our membership base.”

Eric is a developer by trade and responsible for the technology stack and development projects at Profile by Sanford. Without a technical team on staff fluent in custom mobile app development, Eric decided early on to augment his team, knowing that a dedicated, outsourced team with proven mobile app expertise was critical to the project’s success.

Acting as a remote part of Profile’s team, we developed a custom mobile app called Journey for both iOS and Android. The Journey App provides members the convenience of their personalized healthy weight loss plan when and where they need it. Giving them the power to schedule coaching appointments, set reminders, track progress and more, it helps take the stress and overthinking out of weight loss.

We consulted on niche features specific to developing mobile apps, providing guidance on areas such as push notifications, deployment to each app store, and distributing builds to testers.

When new firmware using Bluetooth Low Energy commands struggled to connect members’ scales to their correct WiFi signal, we wrote code which allowed the scale to communicate directly with the app via Bluetooth without members needing to enter their WiFi credentials.

“Each of our members get a WiFi-connected scale that takes their weight and biometric impedance to compute their body fat percentage, muscle mass, all those sorts of things, but there’s no interface on the scale that allows users to easily connect it to WiFi," said Aasheim. "The JMG team was able to build functionality into the app that allows it to talk to the scale via Bluetooth connection and pass over the WiFi router’s information, linking to the WiFi signal the user wants to use and allowing the scale to get on the user’s home network to send the weight readings up to our server automatically. The scales didn’t come with a step-by-step user guide on how to configure them, and JMG was instrumental in suggesting Bluetooth as an alternative.”

Even with a roughly 250 mile stretch of farmland between Profile’s HQ in Sioux Falls and JMG’s office in Minneapolis, communication and collaboration were effortless.

With communication between coaches and members now seamlessly facilitated, the app has allowed Profile to sell more services, adding an estimated $3 million to their bottom line.

Beyond the impact to revenue, Profile’s metrics for measuring success were achieving an average user rating above 4 stars in both the App Store and Google Play Store, as well as positive feedback from its membership base.

“We’re well above where we wanted to be right now," said Aasheim. "Overall, the feedback we’re getting from our membership base on the usability of the app, the features, and overall quality has been really, really good. We’ve been extremely happy with it. It’s lightyears ahead of where we came from in terms of visual appearance, the feature set, and the performance and speed of the app.”