Hi,
In the last few months I’ve been building a medical app, IOLzero, for easy calculations, outcome analysis and optimization in cataract surgery (the process where an ophthalmologist removes the opacified natural lens of your eye and replaces it with an intraocular lens, IOL, which is chosen to give you great vision).
There’s an already exposed public part with common tools for ophthalmologists. There’s also a database module, currently invite-only, to track patient outcomes and perform optimizations.
Things I’ve found have been particularly nice using Anvil:
- I’m a one man team working in this in a part-time setting (I’m an ophthalmologist) so not having to also know a frontend language or hire a frontend person is great!
- Easy to conceptualize and iterate, making use of a lot of python code I already had for calculations
- User system, PDF reporting, SPA like flow, reactive interfaces, pandas and numpy in the backend, it’s just a great experience putting it all together
Things I’d like to see improved in Anvil relate to the developer workflow:
- I’d like to be able to publish 2 live apps from the same code base (a prod and a dev basically, each to its domain). The Build command in the IDE is a nice compromise but it’s a pain to debug mobile interfaces (the inspect command does not like the anvil IDE overlay).
- An analytics module or better documentation on how to make the most of Google Analytics / similar tools. Currently I have a simple GA script running on the html template but since it’s a SPA it does not distinguish between my forms so it’s hard to measure site activity in a granular way.
My future directions:
- Continue to develop tools
- API for external integration
- Offline local deployment
Any feedback on how to improve my webapp is, of course, much appreciated.
Best,
Miguel