Research intent, but no patient-facing system
Megan Shen was building a web-based tool to help patients with advanced illness plan end-of-life care and involve the people who would need to act on those decisions. There was no platform yet. What existed were the research aims, the educational materials, and the underlying decision logic.
At the start, the shape of the work was still unclear. It might have sounded like a web build. In practice, it had to support patients, proxies, legal forms, and sensitive decisions in a clinical context.
Shen was a research lead, not a software organization. The gap was not content. It was the absence of a delivery system that could turn that content into something patients and families could actually use.
“They were thoughtful enough to recommend options that I hadn’t even thought of.”
The work had to do more than present information
Ingenious designed and built the platform from scratch. That included the interface, the application logic, infrastructure, and DevOps support.
Shen supplied the subject-matter expertise, the educational content, and the decision pathways. Ingenious turned those into an interactive system: guided workflows, educational video delivery, and a decision aid that could collect answers and autofill PDF legal documents.
The platform was also structured so a healthcare proxy or other legal decision-maker could complete the process on a patient’s behalf. What began as a loosely defined digital project became a patient platform with video handling, decision workflows, and document generation.
The platform also had to survive a move
The engagement took place across an institutional transition. Shen began the work at Weill Cornell Medical College and later moved to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The platform had to move with her.
That mattered administratively as much as technically. Academic medical environments carry their own process, approvals, and handoffs. A clean migration was part of the job, not an afterthought.
The working model mattered too. Ingenious ran the engagement with regular review cycles and concrete recommendations when the right product shape was still emerging. When parts of the design were misread, the team found a workable adjustment and kept the project moving.
The result is a live platform that now helps patients and families through a painful planning process with more structure. It also gives Shen a durable base for work centered on earlier family involvement, so patient decisions are more likely to be understood and honored. The system now sits at Fred Hutch rather than Cornell.
