The Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) is a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting health care entities in order to improve the quality of patient care. Using its Integrated Technology Platform (ITP), health care messages are routed securely between sites of care, insurance providers, and other organizations so they can stay connected and receive the most up-to-date information to provide the best care for their patients. The ITP leverages cloud technologies to ensure that such a large volume of messages are stored and transmitted quickly and securely.
One such example is the use of containerization, and several components of the ITP were built using this technology. This helped to ensure that resources were being used efficiently while providing high availability and redundancy. However, these components lacked standardization that facilitated easy deployment and management in the cloud.
The ITP also integrates with several 3rd party applications, some of which are also containerized and offer an easy way to deploy their solutions on Kubernetes. MiHIN and RBN saw an opportunity to simultaneously standardize their containerized workloads while also providing a smoother path for integration with 3rd party technologies in the medical space.
Using Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), MiHIN and RBN worked together to implement a platform for onboarding applications in a standardized way. This would include application components of the ITP as well as containerized 3rd party application integrations. This produced a pathway for standardized deployments and unified orchestration of containerized ITP components. The containerization platform was also integrated with the logging and monitoring platform so that the health metrics could be viewed not only for the platform itself but also for applications running on top of it. This provided MiHIN with the ability to drill down into the details of application status for applications fully onboarded onto the platform.
AWS Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) is used as a means to communicate with third-party application integrations. Knowing Kafka can scale to handle well over a million messages per second gives MiHIN flexibility for the future.
MiHIN now has the ability to easily integrate solutions that provide Helm charts for deployment, which can either be internally created or externally provided. MiHIN has achieved standardized but granular control and management for containerized solutions. RBN continues to work with MiHIN to improve the ITP and fully harness the power the cloud services provide for the purposes of improving health care.
