Case Study DevOps platform for the electronic patient record (ePA)

The German healthcare industry lies in the centre of the digital transformation. Here, the basis is built on the medical data, which is exchanged between doctors, patients and even between individual service providers, such as doctors and hospitals. Digitalisation makes it easier to communicate in a user-friendly and secure manner, makes processes in day-to-day treatment more efficient, thus reduces costs as well as creates improved and sometimes new diagnostic possibilities.

Successful digitisation in the health care system requires a digital platform that supports reliable communication between the players in the health care system based on the highest security standards. With the introduction of the telematics infrastructure and the electronic health card, technological infrastructure for the secure exchange of medical information is being created, regardless of the service providers’ systems.

The electronic patient record (ePA), the measuring of health data through an app and personalised medicine also provide new opportunities for health management and optimisation. With the ePA, health insurance holders will be able to manage and control their health data. In addition to findings, doctor’s reports or X-rays, the vaccination card, the maternity passport, the yellow examination booklet for children or the dental bonus booklet are to be stored in the electronic patient file in the future. Due to the complexity of the project, a test phase is to start on 1 January 2021 and the ePA and its functionalities will then be introduced gradually.

Digitalisierung und IT-Lösungen in der Medizintechnik
bigdata service

Task

The introduction of the ePA is the largest IT project in the German health care system until now with the networking of 200,000 service providers and about 73 million insured persons.

Such a project confronts major challenges for the health insurance companies and their IT service providers, who have to create access for the insured via apps and via services in the cloud.

Our Widas Technologie Services GmbH has successfully supported a managed service provider for statutory health insurance companies in implementing its digitalisation initiative ePA. Since 1 January, the ePA has been available to its approximately 90 insurance fund customers and offers their insured persons secure and reliable services in the cloud.

Solution

The path ahead was quite challenging: we took our client’s software development capabilities to a new generational level with MicroServices, a DevOps development model and the OpenShift container platform.

The basis was our conception of a MicroService architecture on a Kubernetes-based container platform. Together with the customer, we quickly developed a DevOps development model in which the developed MicroServices were put into production on the container-based enterprise platform OpenShift using a CI/CD pipeline that we created. The service platform fully considers the high security requirements, e.g., a mutually authenticated and encrypted service-to-service communication was implemented via a service mesh.

Case Study: DevOps Plattform für die elektronische Patientenakte (ePA

Close cooperation with the customer was very important to us – such a paradigm shift can only be successful if the customer’s employees are taken along and enabled to operate such a platform themselves. It goes without saying that we are always happy to support them in this and that is part of our self-image. 

Our technological competence was of great advantage, which we also offer in other projects through the creation of digital solutions for our customers as a managed service, e.g., operated in our data centres. Besides, a CI/CD pipeline for the timely, time-to-market delivery of new functionalities is always part of this.

Verwendete Technologien und Standards

Technologies and standards used

Spring Boot/Cloud, OpenShift 4.6, Jenkins, Helm, Istio, Kiali, Jaeger, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenID Connect/OAuth2, GitOps, DevOps, Scrum

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