A secure web portal for accurate disease detection
Data collection, processing and further management is one of the key operations in any healthcare business. Properly organized data management provides for reduced risks, increased productivity, better planned personnel workflows, and more positive outcomes.
If done with the right tools, data management helps to:
- Improve caregiver-patient communication
- Make insight-driven decisions
- Understand and optimize current personnel workflows
- Plan resources
In this short overview, we’ll shed some light on one of our recent projects related to biotechnology research. Our client is a tech company designing software for the simplified detection of severe brain injury and related brain conditions, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Our team took over the challenge to refactor a legacy web portal — a platform the client was selling to partners. At the very moment, the software helps physicians seamlessly analyze and share medical records, and that without standard, paper-based documentation.
Platform modernization
15 years of experience in the healthcare segment provided necessary domain knowledge to deliver the project. Having the necessary expertise, we covered product architecture, deployment and maintenance optimization, and ensured HIPAA compliance at the same time.
The platform was unreliable and insecure, which increased business risks for both the provider and customers. We refactored the architecture to eliminate the issues and provide our customer with a reliable solution.
Our goals can be reduced to:
1. Product architecture, deployment and maintenance optimization:
- All components are deployed in a reliable way
- All new code changes can be delivered seamlessly
- The software provides for horizontal autoscaling
- The software provides for infrastructure replication
2. HIPAA compliance
We are completely aware of the legislative regulations in the healthcare segment, and built every component in compliance with the HIPAA standard.
We covered:
- Infrastructure, code, and CI/CD
- Environment deployment
- Product maintenance
A refactored web portal: Core functionality
The refactored web portal includes the following sections:
Members
In this portal’s section, the user (clinical worker) gets access to the medical records of every registered patient. The user can add new members, change statuses, and review relevant information such as medical records, assigned categories, scan dates and results.
Users
In the second section, the user can access employee records (the emails, roles and statuses of clinical workers). Having the necessary permissions (role-based access), the user can add new members.
Some features of the modernized platform help to:
- Search records by keyword
- Filter records
- Upload records
- Bulk actions
- Review instructions on how to use the platform
- Review notifications about most recent activities
A platform for accurate disease detection: The challenges
When rebuilding the platform, our engineers faced challenges related to:
The lack of comprehensive project documentation
As we took over the development, our team could not get access to comprehensive project documentation. This made our engineers allocate resources to research and analyze the product’s source code and scripts, identify weaknesses, and choose the most suitable strategy for optimization.
Script-based deployment
We’ve identified that the script-based deployment impaired performance and visibility, and increased the risks. To improve those parameters, we replaced this solution with the industry-standard CI/CD.
Custom hosting
Several problems with deployment and the solution’s configuration had been impairing reliability and security. We used AWS ECS, Secret Manager, AWS RDS and Elasticache to replace the used virtual machine and improve encryption, databases, and cache.
Wrong configuration
Because of wrong configuration, the uploaded medical information was copied into new container instances. We moved the parameters from the container instance to the environmental variables.
The technology used includes:
Tech stack
- Python
- Django
- Daphne
CI/CD tools:
- AWS CodeBuild
- AWS CodePipeline
- GitHub
Infrastructure tools:
- AWS ECS
- AWS ECR
- AWS S3
- Amazon Elasticache
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon ALB
- AWS Certificate Manager
- AWS Secret Manager
- AWS VPC
- AWS ClientVPN
- Terraform
- Docker, Docker Compose
Business value
In order to reach their goals, modern businesses must adopt data-driven thinking and become more strategic. A company’s future success often depends on the thoughtfulness, fluidity and flexibility of their data strategies in terms of supporting accessible intelligence.
If managed with the right software, healthcare businesses might enjoy:
- Improved communication between physicians
- Accessible, reliable and up-to-date medical records
- Employee satisfaction
- More thought-out resource allocation, and, accordingly, increased profits
Data management defines various internal processes, from communication between colleagues to accounting. With the right strategy, electronic medical record management might benefit the company’s future outcomes and improve the quality of provided medical services.
With all relevant information in one easy-to-navigate system, medical workers can seamlessly:
- Review symptoms and other useful details
- Analyze scans to identify abnormal conditions at an early stage
- Share information with colleagues
- Access unique, data-driven insights
- Make more accurate decisions
- Monitor the disease dynamics
Final words
At the very moment, healthcare digitization is one of the key trends in the information & technology segment. We see modern technology gradually revolutionizing caregiver-patient communication and communication between physicians.
Because of numerous obstacles, healthcare organizations are struggling to justify the investment in digitization. Despite this, we believe that with some enthusiasm, governmental funding, as well as digital literacy training, computational technologies will have lasting impacts on the healthcare industry.
