How MiHIN Overcame Scalability Challenges
- An RBN Client Success Story -
The Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) provides a fast, secure way to connect various healthcare entities through its Integrated Technology Platform (ITP). MiHIN has been a pioneer in cloud platform technology, leveraging the immense power of these services. The ITP, a complex series of interconnected components, is capable of processing, normalizing, and delivering millions of messages per day, showcasing the platform's robustness and scalability. Since launching their platform in the cloud, MiHIN has achieved significant milestones in a short period.
Despite their successes, MiHIN encountered challenges typical of organizations migrating to or starting their journey in the cloud. Transitioning from traditional on-premise architecture to a cloud-native environment is a substantial undertaking. MiHIN faced difficulties in managing the complexity of their cloud architecture and maintaining scalability. They needed additional expertise to ensure they were optimizing their cloud infrastructure effectively and moving in the right direction.
MiHIN reached out to RBN to assess their current cloud architecture, processes, and practices to identify areas of improvement, harness the power of the cloud, and optimize.
RBN assisted MiHIN in restructuring its infrastructure as code (IaC), breaking out monolithic components into smaller, decoupled pieces to reduce interdependencies. This also led to quicker, more streamlined deployments. RBN also helped by updating MiHIN’s tagging strategy to include versioning of the application being deployed to dispel confusion around deployed components.
RBN focused on knowledge sharing by interfacing with different teams and departments, helping to onboard new employees, and writing documentation. At the same time, RBN worked with multiple third-party vendors to mitigate any communications issues.
RBN helped refactor many applications to become standardized and cloud-native. The first objective was to improve the containerization strategy for vital components by improving observability, self-autocorrecting applications, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). The second objective was centralizing shared services to streamline MiHIN’s deployment strategy.
RBN implemented centralized logging using several different technologies, including cloud-native ones like AWS X-Ray. RBN enhanced the resiliency of containerized applications by enabling health checks to allow stale containers to auto-restart. RBN also adjusted configurations to allow for more streamlined upgrades of the applications, reducing the amount of code alterations needed for each upgrade.
RBN assisted with refactoring the core application for processing medical messages, breaking out functionalities into their own modules helped improve visibility, which then led to further improvements, increasing the capability and time handling of each message.
Through many minor course corrections, such as promoting good organic growth and eliminating bad organic growth of the ITP, standardizing on industry best practices, and assisting with refactoring components of the ITP to be more cloud-native, RBN has helped MiHIN to be in a much better position. MiHIN continues to work with RBN to make further improvements along their cloud journey.