Healthcare Meets the Cloud

Choosing the right cloud architecture to meet specific privacy and scalability needs

Project Overview

A healthcare startup wanted to help providers spend more time with patients and reduce administrative burdens with a new product. They turned to RevGen to develop a secure, scalable cloud architecture to support their vision.

Client Challenge

Building a solution from the ground up is always a challenge, especially when security, compliance, and scalability are critical. RevGen was tasked with helping the client sort through the myriad options.

Strong foundation for a new platform

Although the startup had a robust vision for their platform, they needed help to select technologies and develop an architecture to make that vision a reality.

Prioritizing security

Security is critical for any system that handles protected health information (PHI) and personally identifying information (PII).

Future scalability

While the startup wanted to minimize costs initially, the solution needed to scale rapidly as providers and practices signed up.

Approach

RevGen worked with client stakeholders to design, build, and document a solution that protects customer data while allowing the startup to scale efficiently. Starting with a thorough understanding of the needs and requirements, RevGen evaluated individual AWS solutions for cost, compliance, and usability, assembling a technology stack and architecture that is HIPAA compliant, economical, and scalable.

Solution

RevGen worked with key client stakeholders to evaluate cloud platforms, architectures, and solutions, assembling a solution that is secure and scalable.

AWS cloud architecture

Amazon Web Services provided the right mix of HIPAA compliant, scalable solutions to support the startup’s vision. A combination of infrastructure technologies including virtual private clouds, a Kubernetes cluster, logging, and constant monitoring provided a secure and compliant architecture. Multitenant data storage was handled by DynamoDB instances and data integration needs were addressed by Lambdas.

Environment and data management

RevGen leveraged the infrastructure-as-code tool, TerraForm, to script and manage environments, allowing new development and testing environments to be commissioned or decommissioned quickly. Semarchy was implemented to handle master data management.

Results

With the best options selected, the startup had all the technology needed to fully realize their vision.

Support for growth

RevGen developed an architecture to economically support platform development with the ability to scale to support thousands of practices and providers, all while using core AWS technologies.

Compliance and security

Selecting HIPAA compliant technologies allowed RevGen and the startup to address security and compliance early in the development process without slowing down the development team.

Operational efficiency

Infrastructure-as-code, containerization, and standard build tools allow code to be deployed quickly and facilitate collaboration across the dev and functional teams.