Early disease detection assistance

October 2021, Abto Software was contacted by a technology provider specializing in biotechnology research. The company designs software helping to identify and treat severe brain injury and related brain conditions.

Abto Software was contacted to refactor a legacy web portal the client has designed for a partner company. The solution allows employees to access, upload, review and share relevant information avoiding standard, paper-based bureaucracy.

The project’s main goals can be reduced to:

1.    Product architecture, deployment and maintenance optimization:

• All components are deployed in a reliable way with redundancy
• The picked DevOps methodology provides for rapid and reliable delivery of new code changes
• The solution provides for horizontal autoscaling with traffic load balancing 
• The infrastructure is applicable for replication

2.    HIPAA compliance

Because of data sensitivity, all components have been set up in compliance with the HIPAA standard.

The built web portal includes the following sections:

• Members
  In this particular section, the user can review registered patients, assigned categories, scan dates and results. The functionality also includes the opportunity to add new members and change scan statuses.

• Users
  In the next section, the user can review registered personnel, their emails, roles as well as current statuses. With the required permission, one can also add new employees.

We covered:

• Infrastructure, code, and CI/CD
  – The implementation of CI/CD for completely automated deployment
  – The replacement of the hosting solution in place
  – The switch to proper container configuration
• Development-related environments deployment
• Production environment deployment
• Product maintenance

The optimized web portal works on container sets that are scaled up and down automatically depending on the system load:

1. Django implements the website and its admin panel

2. Daphne implements the real-time data exchange through the Websocket protocol

3. Scheduler implements the server-side scheduled activities

During the project’s scope, our team faced challenges related to:

The absence of proper project documentation

As the legacy product was on support stage, our team did not have access to proper project documentation. Our engineers have analyzed the product’s source code, the initial deployment scripts as well as the development-related and environment implementations in order to understand its architecture, to identify weak points and determine the best optimization strategy.

Script-based deployment

The product’s script-based deployment impaired performance and visibility, and increased the risk or errors. Our developers successfully replaced the solution with the industry-standard CI/CD based on AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline.

A custom hosting solution

Several issues made the legacy solution unreliable and insecure:

• The project was deployed on just one single virtual machine
• The containers were deployed by using Docker Compose
• The solution’s configuration files were stored in plain text form

We used AWS ECS to replace the host virtual machine, Secret Manager for encryption, AWS RDS for databases, AWS Elasticache for cache in order to fix the issues.

The wrong container configuration

Because of the incorrect container configuration, the files were copied into a newly created container instance. We moved all the container parameters from the configuration files inside the container instance to the environmental variables.

We modernized the client’s legacy product, which now provides for streamlined medical record management. The product can be sold to healthcare providers interested in optimizing their routine processes, saving time and money, and improving internal operations related to employee cooperation.

The optimized web portal:

• Accelerates the investigation process
  The personnel can access, upload, review and share the patients’ medical records using their mobile devices. The solution improves communication and cooperation between professionals, and provides for accurate, data-driven decision-making.

• Saves resources
  The employees can upload and review relevant information without wasting their time on manual data entry. The platform provides for notably simplified data management and helps save financial and human resources.