Business Challenge
With more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare, MEDHOST has a long history of developing and implementing innovative approaches to address the evolving needs of healthcare professionals. The customer experience is becoming an increasingly key differentiator for industry leaders, so MEDHOST set out to develop “YourCareCommunity,” a new solution aimed at automating and simplifying patient and provider-related tasks and communication. The solution was designed to provide patients and their caregivers with online access to personal health records and related tools for easier and faster interaction with healthcare providers.
Project Description
MEDHOST partnered with SoftServe to build the YourCareCommunity platform using a micro service architecture for th e Cloud-based portal on AWS. This approach was chosen to decrease time-to-market for new feature releases and efficiently divide the workload between engineering teams. AWS also made it possible to build a comprehensive consumer relationship management solution with integrated multifaceted analytics based on a Cloud data exchange platform.
SoftServe and MEDHOST built YouCareCommunity’s system architecture on Docker containers, which were chosen for their exceptional ability to scale and perform fast application deployment. This decision also allowed SoftServe and MEDHOST to divide the application’s backend logic into independent parts and distribute their development among different teams.
Within the scope of this project, the joint technical team also implemented tools that enabled the continuous integration server to build microservices and other system components on Docker containers and automatically publish them to internal development Docker registry and ECR on AWS. Afterwards, the configuration management tool was used for automation of Docker containers deployment into development environments.
The engineering team was using Docker-based microservices and innovative service registry and centralized configuration management instruments together with HAproxy for load balancing. This helps ensure the reliable service discovery and routing mechanism. HA-proxy configuration is dynamically recreated and reloaded from configuration registry with minimal downtime when the service registration state changes. This substantially increases the system stability and allows the developers to use agile dynamic infrastructure.
Finally, Chef enables instance provisioning and manages configuration and service lifecycle on production environments, including deployment of microservices and Docker containers. During the development process, engineers separat ed accounts for development and production within AWS and enabled communication between the units they used in VPC peer connections. The following AWS services were used: EC2, VPC, ELB, Rote53, S3, IAM, RDS, ECR, ElasticCache, CloudWatch, SQS, SNS, SES WorkDocs, Elastic Transcoder and WorkSpaces.
Value Delivered
The architecture suggested by SoftServe’s experts reflects a modern approach to software development, deployment, and maintenance that enabled MEDHOST to be more agile and efficient in their development processes, cut development costs, and decrease time to market.
“I would describe working with SoftServe with one word – engaging. Working with SoftServe is a true partnership. I would say, on average, SoftServe’s resources are much more technically deep than other vendors I have used,” said Craig Badcock, vice president of product development at YourCareUniverse, Inc., a MEDHOST company.
MEDHOST’s YourCareCommunity enables healthcare providers to build an efficient, patient-centric digital strategy that can meet the increasingly competitive expectations of healthcare consumers. YourCareCommunity is currently helping more than 340 hospitals across the United States improve consumer engagement, enhance care, and build brand loyalty among their patients.