The client and the context
Emma Clinic is the company of Dr. Charles Taieb, a physician by training with experience in public health. He sets up large international studies on skin diseases, for healthcare companies, scientific societies or patient associations. Tens of thousands of people answer a questionnaire, in as many as several dozen countries.
We have known him since 2018, when Charles Bordet carried out statistical analyses for him. He came back to us in 2024 with a first project around the ALL study, run with Pierre Fabre among 50,552 people in 20 countries.
The problem
A study of this size produces a large amount of data, and each reader is looking for only a few figures. An Italian doctor wants to know the prevalence of a disease in Italy among women aged 20 to 30. The sponsor wants to show the study on a touchscreen to the doctors who stop by its conference booths.
Presentation therefore mattered as much as the numbers. The tool had to use the study’s colors and stay readable on a tablet. Charles Taieb had made a first attempt with another vendor, which he describes as “very rudimentary, very dull”.
What we did
The platform is used in three steps. The user builds a population with filters such as country, sex, age, skin phototype or skin disease. They then open a topic, for example prevalence or the care pathway. They read the results for that population, broken down by sex and age group, and can export them to a PDF report.
The interface was designed by Cécile Uzel, our UI/UX web designer, in the study’s colors, for both desktop and tablet.
One description file per study. Everything specific to a study lives in one file, which lists each question of the questionnaire with the label to display, the topic it appears under, the chart type and the answer used to calculate the percentage. The application reads this file at startup and builds the screens of each topic from it. Taking on a new study therefore comes down to filling in a new file, adapting the filters and applying the visual identity, since the charts and the PDF export are already there.
A separate platform for each study. Each study has its own sponsor, and a sponsor must only see its own. Each platform therefore has its own address, its own server hosted in Europe and its own login portal. Account creation is restricted to the email addresses of the sponsor concerned and those of Emma Clinic, and access opens once the address is verified.
The results
The first platform served as the base for the next ones, and the timelines show it. It took six weeks to show the client the first version of ALL about, the platform for the ALL study. Seventeen days later, before it had even gone live, Charles Taieb ordered a second one for Scars of Life, a La Roche-Posay study on eczema run among 30,000 adults in 27 countries. The first version of that second platform was ready ten days after development started.
The next two, built by our R Shiny developer, Léo Pédemay, kept the same pace. For a study on acne, the first version was ready eleven days after work started, and the development of I’SPOT, a study on pigmentation disorders run among 48,000 people in 34 countries, took two weeks.
All four platforms are online, and we host and maintain them. The sponsors’ medical teams use them in their meetings and internal presentations. In his testimonial, Charles Taieb puts it this way: “if we’ve done one, then three, then four, and maybe a fifth, it’s because clearly it worked”.
Do you have a data application to adapt for several clients or several studies? Get in touch.