AWS - HealthTech client

Industry: HealthTech

AWS - HealthTech client

Posted by Encora on May 19, 2023 11:11:44 AM

Encora’s approach drove significant improvements across the client’s eCommerce KPI dashboard.

Topics: HealthTech

Industry Context

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a significant shift toward remote care, which is expected to continue to grow within the next few years
To support the patient journey, there is a growing need for modern, digitized solutions
The current trend in healthcare is to focus on improving the patient experience and engagement with personalized treatment
Data analysis can greatly help in understanding product usage and identifying areas for improvement

Client Challenge

Redesign and develop a remote care delivery platform to increase security, compliance, and omnichannel communication between patient and provider
The solution must comply with HIPAA regulatory requirements
Provide resilient integrations with third-party tools
Enable data-driven product decisions with dashboards and reports

Approach

Envision: Product Management - supported client’s infrastructure by improving security, test coverage, third-party tools integration, and CI/CD processes. Make the product compliant with HIPAA regulations
Enable: Cloud Services - applied best practices in AWS aiming at better performance, stability, and security. Every presented solution is well documented and clearly outlines the trade-offs involved Platform Modernization, modernization of the patient and internal portals, and implementation of new treatment programs. Support for feature toggle and A/B Testing
Engineer: Product Engineering & Development - took a previous version of the product, improved it, and released Web and mobile apps to patients. Developed new features to address the fast-paced needs of a startup. DevOps, improved the CI/CD process. Use of IaC and monitoring tools. Created ephemeral environments to simulate the real application server capacity with a Kubernetes cluster. Data Science & Engineering, created data pipelines and architected a data warehouse to support the analysis of product data. Developed version-controlled dashboards and reports for monitoring KPIs for different stakeholders and areas of the company. Implementation of data governance practices. Quality Assurance, performed a wide variety of tests: unit, regression, integration, visual, and performance. Some are automated to run every day, covering most features. Commits are only merged to the master branch when all unit and integration tests are passed
Engage: Digital Experience - worked with the product team to deliver the best experience for patients. Participated in meetings for brainstorming, spec, and tech designs

Why AWS?

Received an AWS project from the client's previous partner, and AWS services enabled Encora to improve the infrastructure by implementing a series of best practices:
The database and applications were segmented to separate development and production instances, allowing for better isolation of failures
A Load Balancer was added to improve the high availability, scalability, and security of the application
The RDS instance was privately isolated in a VPC for increased security, particularly as the client handles PHI data. Encryption was implemented for data at rest and in transit across all services
The Jenkins instance was made scalable by building the application with two extra spot instances, as needed
CloudWatch was used to enable logging and monitoring of key services that were used.

AWS Solution

The website's front end and back end, including databases, are hosted on AWS. The mobile app seamlessly integrates with the AWS services as well. Additionally, the team used a range of AWS services for DevOps activities:

Compute/Storage: Amazon EC2, AWS EKS, Amazon ELB, AWS Lambda, AWS RDS, and Amazon S3
Messaging: Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SES
Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch
Networking: Amazon VPC

The team also uses Ansible for infrastructure provisioning.

Results

EKS Cluster with ephemeral containers enables improved testing, faster deployments, scalability, and cost savings by allowing developers to work in an environment that closely mirrors the capacity of the production environment
High automated test coverage increased confidence during deployments, reducing deployment time from 2 weeks to 4 hours
The mobile app is now the primary channel of the organization, handling nearly 70% of the user traffic
Increased weekly repurchase rate increased by over 20% in 3 months after implementing a new feature in the application
Ad-hoc reports and dashboards provide insights on product usage, enabling data-driven decisions on the development of new features