AposHealth

Apos®, a manufacturer of FDA-cleared medical devices for chronic knee pain (knee osteoarthritis)


Goals:
- Develop a digital platform to manage all the processes related to Apos biomechanical footwear technology.
- Build the solution from scratch as there was no existing architecture.
- Ensure the platform adheres to HIPAA and other healthcare regulations.
- Enable healthcare providers to monitor patient progress, adjust treatment plans, and see analytics.
- Allow patients to access their treatment progress, receive personalized guidance, and interact with healthcare providers.

Product challenges
In seeking to develop a digital platform to streamline an innovative knee osteoarthritis treatment, AposHealth faced several key pains and challenges needed to be addressed:
- Lack of any existing architecture to develop a comprehensive solution
- Lack of understanding on how to connect insurance requests for specific knee treatments by partnering clinics tailored to each patient's needs
- Implementing a robust authentication/authorization system to handle user roles and permissions across multiple clinics
- Lack of a clear implementation plan for assessment, monitoring, and reporting of treatment results
- Concerns around managing and optimizing database performance as patient datasets grew
- Achieving accurate gait analysis using smartphone sensor data for the HCP app

Managerial and Technical challenges
- No in-house development existed prior to start of this project
- No software architecture,
- No definition of a product existed
- Understanding timelines and needs of all the stakeholders

My contribution:
- Learn the needs and understand the required product
- Learn the budget and the timeline
- Research for technology and creating the software architecture that matches all product needs.
- Create development group structure, hiring process
- After in-house vs outstaffing vs outsourcing and israel vs offshore research - find partner for hiring offshore HR
- Hands on first POCs: BE (Java SB), FE (React + React Native), DevOps (AWS services, deployment, etc.)
- Development process organization. Sprints, JIRA, QA, versions, deliverables.
- Coding and security standards
- First code reviews
- Agile ceremonies: Daily standup, Sprint Planning, Sprint review, Backlog grooming, Retrospective,
- Documentation organization, templates etc.
- Team Leads mentoring
- Hiring / Firing
- Overseeing development process

In 2021, I joined AposHealth as Director of R&D with one clear mission: to build the entire R&D organization from scratch. At that point, there was no team, no architecture, and not even a basic draft of the product — just the idea of building a tool to reduce the time physicians spend per patient.

I started by designing the system architecture and choosing the right tech stack to support it. Based on that, I defined the structure of the R&D group — including roles, responsibilities, and how the team would grow over time.

Next, I ran a deep analysis on how best to build the team — in-house vs. outsourced vs. outstaffed, and local (Israel) vs. offshore. I screened multiple vendors and eventually found the perfect hiring partner — one that matched our culture, budget, and was willing to sign a BAA, which was critical due to HIPAA compliance.

With the right people on board, we built a strong team and launched a high-quality product — on time and within budget. It was one of those rare situations where you get to shape everything from day one and see it through to real business value.