Healthcare technology firm MEDHOST overhauls customer experience and doubles customer base with SoftServe personal health record solution

The challenge: Leading customer experience

As technology in the medical industry matures, customers have come to expect as smooth and flexible an experience as with any consumer-level service. To meet these needs, MEDHOST decided to develop a new solution to automate and simplify tasks and communications with patients and providers.

Patients and their caregivers needed remote digital access to personal health records, to allow for quicker and easier interaction with MEDHOST’s associated healthcare providers.

The solution: Migrate, stabilize, develop, implement

Partnering with experts at SoftServe, MEDHOST achieved the edge in customer experience the organisation needed – which resulted in doubling its customer base – as well as saving £1m in running costs across its data infrastructure.

The project followed a four-phase plan to migrate MEDHOST’s database, stabilize its EMPI solution, strengthen development resource, and finally implement new business process management services:

Phase 1: Migrate

SoftServe assisted MEDHOST in migrating its existing PostgreSQL-based databases into Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). SoftServe also increased container density for each of the database’s nodes in Docker, and decreased the number of Amazon EC2 instances it was using.

Phase 2: Stabilize and upgrade

Next, it was time to stabilize MEDHOST’s enterprise master patient index (EMPI) solution and its integrated web app. Improving the general availability of the service, boosting security, simplifying how AWS services are managed, and working to decrease performance bottleneck were also key parts of this phase.

Phase 3: Develop

With a development focus, Phase 3 involved pulling DevOps and TechOps teams closer together with a shared code base, which reduced development time and helped avoided manual errors that tend to occur when creating release branches of code. Upgrading Amazing Machine Images (AMI) was also made simpler to tighten security upgrades. Improving the way MEDHOST worked with AWS also improved disaster recovery.

Outcomes at-a-glance: Highlights of MEDHOSTS’s customer experience improvement project

• Increased the quality and level of services offered in virtual machine environments
• Improved management of new service releases
• Implemented infrastructure as code (IaC) into development processes
• Automated disaster recovery across the organisation, with close-to-real time functionality
• Created a single code base for DevOps and TechOps teams to share
• Improved monitoring and issue tracking
• Stabilized MEDHOST’s enterprise master patient index (EMPI) solution
• Refined the organisation’s ability to integrate external web applications into its services
• Boosted general availability of services while decreasing performance bottlenecks
• Simplified release management in AWS-hosted services
• Upgraded information security across the organisation
• Improved the traceability of release codes for digital assets

Value delivered: A smoother customer experience, with big cost-savings

As the project drew to a close, MEDHOST and SoftServe had succeeded in vastly improving the organisation’s customer experience by streamlining the way cloud services worked, and introducing new efficiencies in MEDHOST’s delivery of new products and services.

Since SoftServe’s implementation, MEDHOST’s user base of customers and patients has doubled.

SoftServe’s speedy implementation of changes, along with its highly optimized technological deployment, also resulted in around $1M infrastructure savings across MEDHOST’s stack. This included an overall month-by-month reduction of three times what MEDHOST was spending previously, which work out at year-on-year savings of $800,000, and savings in deployment and support of $200,000.