Key Insight
Client
Fit2Fly
Annual Cases
600K annual medical cases
Medical Conditions
100+ medical conditions
Process
3 step determination process
A medical professional sits across from a patient who is about to fly. The patient has a condition (cardiac, respiratory, post-surgical, oncological, neurological, sometimes several at once), and the doctor needs to make a confident determination. Is this person safe to be in a pressurised cabin at altitude, hours away from a hospital, possibly without ground support at the destination?
The decision sits on top of dozens of variables. Cabin pressure equivalents. Oxygen saturation thresholds. Time since surgery. Medication interactions with reduced cabin oxygen. Mobility considerations during emergency egress. Airline-specific medical clearance requirements that vary carrier-by-carrier. Insurer requirements. Repatriation considerations if something goes wrong.
Most travel medicine doctors are making these calls under time pressure, with patients waiting and flight dates fixed. They need to be right, and they need to be right quickly.
The Challenge
The systems travel medicine clinicians had been using to support this decision weren’t built for it. Manual data entry across multiple disconnected tools.
Complicated assessment criteria stored in PDFs and reference documents that needed to be cross-referenced by hand. Large caseloads against time-poor specialists. And the underlying complexity of the clinical picture itself, with multiple conditions, multiple medications, multiple flight legs, and sometimes multiple regulatory regimes for international itineraries.
The combination meant that even capable, experienced clinicians were doing more administrative pattern-matching than clinical reasoning. The most cognitively expensive part of their day was the part the technology was supposed to be making easier.
Medical professionals often need to make a swift and confident assessment on a patient’s capacity to fly based on any number of complicated conditions and considerations.
The transport of patients by air involves certain risks. Medical professionals across the globe are faced with the responsibility of approving the transportation of patient by air, and determining if a patient requires in-flight medical assistance on board or whether the patient is fit to fly at all. As aviation medicine is a relatively new medical discipline with emerging guidelines, medical professionals are met with the challenge of accessing up-to-date information, advice and documentation.
Main pain points
- Poor and complicated systems
- Manual data entry
- Complicated assessment criteria
- Large caseloads and time-poor doctors
The Solution
IONYX designed and built Fit2Fly as a focused clinical assessment platform, purpose-built for the specific decision travel medicine doctors needed to make rather than a general-purpose medical tool retrofitted to the use case.
The work included full product delivery: logo design and brand identity, end-to-end user experience design centred on the clinician’s actual workflow, and complete back-end and front-end development.
IONYX designed and built a simple yet intuitive system to dramatically reduce time and cognitive load for doctors to determine whether their patients are fit to fly. We drew input from medical professionals within the aero-medical transportation field and International Assistance Group stakeholders to ensure the responsive system was best practice. IONYX was engaged with the following:
- Logo design and brand kit
- User experience design
- Back and front-end development
The design philosophy was deliberate. Clinicians don’t need more information on screen. They need the right information, in the right order, at the right moment. Fit2Fly structures the assessment so the platform asks for exactly what’s needed at each step of the clinical reasoning process, presents clinical reference data and assessment criteria in-context rather than in a separate manual, and produces a defensible, documented determination at the end of the workflow rather than leaving the clinician to assemble it themselves.
The interface looks simple. The complexity it manages on the clinician’s behalf is anything but.
Designed for the context
Our form designs were targeted for tablet and mobile users with speed of use in mind. Inputs are amply spaced and conditional form logic meant we were only showing the user content relevant to their patient in the determination journey.
The Results
Fit2Fly turned a high-stakes, administratively heavy clinical decision into a structured, defensible workflow that clinicians could actually move through quickly without losing rigour. The platform meets clinicians where they actually work, under time pressure, with complicated patients, and with the need to document their reasoning, and it removes the friction that the previous tooling was creating.
For the broader travel medicine and aviation health industry, Fit2Fly demonstrated that the “assess fitness to fly” workflow could be productised, and that this didn’t have to be a free-form clinical exercise re-invented in every clinic. The platform has continued to evolve since launch, with IONYX maintaining and extending the product as the clinical landscape and the airline regulatory environment have shifted.
We’re tracking performance and input from medical professionals to help refine the user experience. This is the current state: fit2fly.international-assistance-group.com/
