Tandem
Healthcare
Tandem Healthcare is a confidential healthcare company that focuses on providing tailored care to senior citizens, through its network of caregivers. They approached MethodData to build an application which enabled caregivers to easily locate clients and provide care tailored to each client’s individual needs. The application also needed to serve as a scheduler for caregivers and a way to track their care.
To guarantee tailored care for each client, caregivers need access to a client’s health information to know how best to provide care as well as knowing any specific precautions when treating a client. This requires storing each client’s private health information onto the application for access by a caregiver when providing care. This however raises security and privacy concerns around compliance with the HIPAA regulation. In addition to this, the company also needed redundant data removed whilst maintaining the integrity of their remaining data.
To ensure these challenges are addressed, MethodData came with the solution of moving the application data to a data lake which would provide a centralized data repository which would help streamline data management processes for the company but also provide robust security features and access control to protect sensitive PHI from unauthorized access.
For this to be efficiently done, the data lake would need to be hosted by a reputable cloud provider to ensure security, privacy, and compliance to regulations such as HIPAA and HITECH.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was consequently selected as the main cloud-provider for the application’s data due its range of HIPAA compliant services and elastic infrastructure which paves the way for a secure, scalable application that will ensure all sensitive client health data is protected and handled in a HIPAA compliant manner. To kickstart this process, migration of data from Microsoft Azure to AWS would be undertaken.
The implementation of a meticulous migration strategy enabled a seamless transfer of data from Azure to AWS, marking a significant milestone in the company’s digital transformation journey.The outcome of this development process was a multicomponent application that connects to platforms such as Skedulo, LeadSquared, ADP, Google Maps, and HelloSign. The application’s seamless integration with AWS services such as AWS DynamoDB and S3 enables efficient & scalable data storage and processing of caregiver workflows. By using AWS as its cloud provider, the application empowers caregivers with real-time access to client information helping them make timely decisions when delivering care to clients.
All the AWS services used by the application are HIPAA eligible services and have been used in a manner that guarantees compliance with HIPAA and HITECH regulations ensuring that sensitive healthcare data is only available to healthcare professionals (i.e. caregivers) of the covered entity (healthcare company). The application is currently being used by the company to provide care to its clients through its network of caregivers with Methoddata currently serving as its business associate in maintaining the application’s technical aspects.
In conclusion, Leveraging AWS's infrastructure, including services like Amazon Redshift for data storage, has led to improved data reliability and scalability of the caregiver application. The migration process enabled seamless data transfer and paved the way for adding more features to the application by moving data to a single source of truth. It also demonstrates how leveraging AWS services, in a HIPAA compliant manner, can result in an application that empowers caregivers, strengthens privacy and security and ultimately contributes to the well-being of clients required care.
