A Pandemic Demanded a New Kind of Health Infrastructure
When COVID-19 emerged, businesses, schools, and individuals were left with an impossible question: how do you safely return to shared spaces when the virus is invisible, its spread is unpredictable, and information is fragmented across healthcare providers, testing labs, and public health systems?
The consequences of getting this wrong were severe — both for individuals who risked their health and for the organizations legally and ethically responsible for maintaining safe environments. Yet the tools available were woefully inadequate.
Wellbility, a medical services company, saw this gap clearly. They identified three distinct but interlocking problems that a well-designed mobile application could solve.
No Reliable Exposure Awareness
People had no way of knowing if they had been near a sick individual, making quarantine decisions uninformed and inconsistent.
Fragmented Testing Access
Scheduling a COVID test required navigating multiple websites and phone calls, with results delivered through entirely separate systems — if at all.
No Workplace Health Screening
Employers had no scalable, technology-driven way to perform daily health checks on employees before they entered facilities.
Symptom Ambiguity
Patients couldn't determine whether symptoms were COVID-19, seasonal flu, or something else, leading to either unnecessary panic or dangerous under-caution.
One Codebase, Two Platforms, Zero Compromise
Healthcare applications face a unique tension: they must reach the widest possible audience, but they also can't afford the bugs and inconsistencies that come with a rushed multi-platform strategy. By building Wellbility with Flutter, OakTree Apps delivered a single, shared codebase that ran natively on both iOS and Android — cutting development time, aligning behavior across devices, and enabling a faster, more reliable launch at a moment when speed genuinely mattered.
A Three-Part Platform Built for Real-World Pandemic Response
OakTree Apps worked closely with Wellbility's clinical and operational teams to architect a mobile platform that addressed each problem as an integrated system, not a collection of disconnected features.
Real-Time Exposure Notifications
The cornerstone feature of the app notifies users if they have been in close proximity to a person who has reported being ill. Rather than relying on manual contact tracing — a process that is slow, error-prone, and dependent on memory — Wellbility's system provides users with immediate, actionable alerts. Upon receiving a notification, users are presented with personalized self-isolation guidelines tailored to current public health standards.
In-App Lab Test Scheduling & Results
Wellbility eliminated the fragmented experience of booking a COVID-19 test by bringing scheduling directly into the app. Users can browse available testing locations and time slots, book appointments, and — critically — receive their lab results without ever leaving the platform. By closing the loop between scheduling and results delivery, Wellbility significantly reduced the anxiety and uncertainty that defined the early pandemic testing experience.
Enterprise Thermal Screening via Orion Integration
For businesses and schools working to reopen their facilities, Wellbility built an enterprise-grade health screening layer powered by a partnership with Orion. Using Orion's thermal temperature scanning hardware, organizations can scan employees and students as they enter a building. The app acts as the intelligent backend for this process — logging results, flagging anomalies, and providing administrators with a clear, auditable record of daily screenings.
Wellbility Featured on NBC 5 News
Shortly after launch, Wellbility's contact tracing app caught the attention of NBC 5, one of New England's leading television news stations. Jeff Mitchell, Vice President of Sales at Wellbility, appeared on the broadcast to walk through the app's core features, joined by Adam Goldstein, Executive Director of The Leahy Center for Digital Forensics & Cybersecurity.
"OakTree Apps is an excellent technology partner. They are reliable and flexible when working on projects. OakTree Apps was integral to the success of the launch of our software products. I am glad we chose OakTree Apps as a technology partner."
Andrew Keady — COO, WellbilityBuilding for Trust, Speed, and Scale Under Pressure
Healthcare applications carry a weight that consumer apps don't. Users are making decisions that affect their physical health and the safety of people around them. Every interaction — an exposure alert, a test result, a workplace screening record — is a moment of trust. OakTree Apps approached the Wellbility build with this in mind at every architectural decision.
Cross-Platform Performance with Flutter
Flutter's compiled-to-native model meant Wellbility delivered smooth, responsive experiences on both iOS and Android without the performance compromises that often plague cross-platform health apps. Animations, notification delivery, and real-time data updates all needed to feel instantaneous in a context where delays could erode user confidence in the system.
Reliable Push Notification Infrastructure
The exposure notification feature is only as valuable as its reliability. OakTree Apps built a robust push notification system that ensures alerts are delivered promptly, even in low-connectivity environments. The engineering team paid particular attention to notification state management — ensuring that users who received an exposure alert couldn't accidentally dismiss critical safety information before reading it.
Hardware Integration with Orion
Connecting a Flutter mobile application to Orion's thermal scanning hardware required careful API design and close collaboration between Wellbility's clinical operations team and OakTree Apps' engineering team. The integration needed to be stable enough for daily enterprise use while remaining flexible enough to accommodate different hardware configurations across different facility types.
"The challenge wasn't just writing code — it was understanding the clinical workflows, the operational reality of businesses trying to reopen, and the anxiety individual users were experiencing. That human context shaped every decision we made."OakTree Apps Engineering Team
From Concept to Critical Infrastructure, on Time
Wellbility launched on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, delivering a cross-platform solution that addressed three distinct pandemic-era problems through a single, cohesive product.
Simultaneous iOS and Android launch with a single Flutter codebase, dramatically reducing development and maintenance overhead.
Automated exposure notification system replacing manual contact tracing with real-time digital alerts and self-isolation guidance.
End-to-end test management — from appointment scheduling to in-app results delivery — consolidated into a single patient experience.
Enterprise thermal screening capability via Orion integration, giving businesses and schools a scalable daily health check workflow.
Wellbility's COO publicly credited OakTree Apps as "integral to the success of the launch" — a rare, direct validation of partnership quality.
A platform architecture built to scale — capable of expanding to new markets, additional health screening modalities, and post-pandemic use cases.
What Healthcare Mobile Done Right Actually Requires
The Wellbility engagement reinforced several principles that OakTree Apps brings to every healthcare build. The stakes in health tech are different — users are not browsing casually. They're trying to protect themselves and their communities, often under stress. That changes how you design, how you engineer, and how you collaborate.
Context drives architecture, not the other way around.
The decision to build with Flutter wasn't driven by trend — it was driven by the need to reach as many users as possible, as quickly as possible, without compromising quality. In a public health context, platform exclusivity isn't an option. The architecture followed the mission.
Enterprise and consumer needs must coexist.
Wellbility had to serve two fundamentally different users within the same product: an individual worried about their health, and a facilities manager running morning screenings for 300 employees. Building a coherent experience that served both required deep product thinking and close collaboration with Wellbility's team throughout development.
Reliability is the product.
In consumer apps, a delayed notification is a minor annoyance. In a health alert system, it's a failure with real consequences. OakTree Apps approached performance and reliability as primary product requirements, not secondary engineering concerns — a mindset that should define every healthcare build.
Building Something That Matters?
OakTree Apps specializes in healthcare mobile applications, Flutter development, and complex integrations. If you're solving a real problem that requires a trusted technical partner, let's talk.
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