The Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) is a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting healthcare entities to improve the quality of patient care. Using its Integrated Technology Platform (ITP), healthcare 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 a large volume of messages are stored and transmitted quickly and securely.
The ITP is a vast system of interconnected components, all working together to ensure that message flow is processed efficiently. These components are usually decoupled yet interdependent, which can add to the complexity of deployments regarding dependency management. In addition to this, some of MiHIN’s customers that use the ITP have strict requirements, bounding their health network from other customers, which necessitates a new deployment of the platform to a separate environment. Deployment of the entire platform would take months to complete.
As the platform grew, there was an emergent need to organize and streamline deployments to new environments.
RBN worked with MiHIN to tackle this challenge. First, RBN itemized the different components necessary for the deployments and kept track of the dependencies for each. RBN split out the Terraform templates used for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) so it wasn’t monolithic and eliminated circular dependencies. RBN created a standard process for new deployments, defining the order of operations, listing caveats, and other minor manual steps, and documented the process thoroughly. RBN also resolved deployment issues with Terraform and the Serverless Framework to streamline the process for deployments in the future.
After iterating over this process multiple times, RBN and MiHIN ensured that a new deployment of the entire platform to a fresh environment was easier, faster, and much more streamlined. It takes much less effort to launch a new customer with similar strict requirements. The length of time for the full deployment process was reduced to two weeks rather than several months, and continues to improve even as ITP itself continues to grow. New deployments also automatically hook into the central logging and monitoring platform, allowing for easier management and visibility right out of the gate.
MiHIN continues to work with RBN to improve and optimize deployment processes and their cloud architecture for the platform.
