Building Offline-First Pharma Applications: Overcoming Real-World Challenges

If we rewind a thousand years back (or maybe just a few decades! ??), medical representatives relied on pen and paper to record meetings, manage schedules, and track assessments. Fast forward to today, and everything has shifted to mobile applications—providing real-time insights, seamless data management, and all the day-to-day activities.

Pharmaceutical sales teams rely on mobile applications to manage daily activities—scheduling meetings, recording assessments, and handling customer interactions. But what happens when they operate in areas with poor network connectivity?

To solve this, we built an offline-first pharma application that allowed medical representatives to work seamlessly without internet access and sync data when connectivity was restored. However, handling large datasets and ensuring data integrity in an offline environment presented several challenges.

?Challenge #1: Syncing Data Fast, Without Overwrites or Losses

Medical reps often created records offline, and once they regained network connectivity, the data would sync to the server. But this introduced some real headaches:

• Larger Sync Time: Data Sync to and from Device was really taking a long time, making users quit the Apps.
• Overwrites—One update could unintentionally replace another.
• Data Loss—Failed sync attempts meant some records never made it to the server.

How We Solved It:

Switched to Delta Sync—Instead of syncing everything, we only sent the fields that changed, making updates faster and more reliable.

Hybrid Sync Approach—Real-time sync for critical updates, while bulk data was synced in batches to avoid overload.

Implemented Smart Retry—If a sync failed, our system retried it intelligently with increasing wait times, ensuring no data was lost.

Implemented Conflict Resolution Implemented conflict resolution strategies (timestamp-based merging, version tracking).

Impact: Reduced data loss, improved reliability, and smoother sync operations & Happy Customers :-)

?Challenge #2: Handling Large Volumes of Data Efficiently

The app needs to store and process huge datasets on-device, including:

• Data related to doctors & hospitals and their related data, like emails, territories they are mapped with, addresses (maybe multiple assigned to a doctor and to a hospital), and many other linked data.

For example, there are 50k doctors in one territory, and on average, 3 linked data of each type amounting to more than 2-3 lakhs of records get into your device DB.

• Doctor Consents
• Market Scans
• Assessments & Assessment Responses
• Surveys, etc.

Problems We Encountered:

• Device crashes due to limitation of on-device DB.
• Slow performance when querying and syncing large datasets.

How We Solved It:

Data Partitioning—We segmented data into smaller logical units, loading only what's necessary.

Lazy Loading & Pagination—Fetched data in chunks instead of all at once, reducing memory usage.

Impact: Enhanced app performance, minimized crashes, efficient data management & happy customers :-) .

Challenge #3: Multi-Territory Compliance & Localization

Pharmaceutical companies operate globally, but each country has its own regulatory and operational requirements.

Challenge:

Deploying a single software solution across different regions while complying with local laws (e.g., GDPR in Europe, PIPL in China) required dynamic configurations and modular architecture.

Solution:

• Built config-driven feature toggles, allowing country-specific compliance without modifying core code.
• Implemented multi-language support with dynamic/static content loading.
• Built a translation engine in the back end for configurable forms on the front end that can display the translated text.

Impact: Global compliance, improved user experience, and faster market expansion & Happy Customers

Key Takeaways

By leveraging smart sync strategies, data partitioning, and compliance adherence, we built a scalable, high-performance application that delivers a seamless user experience across regions.