Ukrainian digital health: how to be in the resource and the moment

The case of digital health solution implementation on a national scale

By 2017, we had already built a strong reputation in the IT business, but only in a number of areas such as ERP and IoT. Nevertheless, our new project in the outsourcing format was medical in nature, and on a national level.

The reform of the healthcare system in Ukraine took quite a long time, but when it started on September 20, 2017, it began to develop rapidly. Thinking back to those days, I can say that everyone learned: the eHealth team, the developers of MIS (medical information systems), and the hospitals themselves.

Flying start

Our project began in May 2017 with the first introduction to the executive, choosing a sales strategy and implementing a future product. Why the strategy? Because we had to decide whether we were going to sell a boxed product or a cloud solution. How will the price be set? Could we flexibly expand functionality? The cost of releasing updates? Difficulties in training? And, of course, the total cost of ownership. 

These are not all the questions above we asked the owners of the future product. 

If we draw parallels with medicine (since we were part of this domain), we assembled a consilium: architects, business analysts, and leading developers. Because we were tasked with implementing and bringing to market the MVP of the future MIS platform in three months. Three months - it is a serious challenge! 

With the consilium we decide to build a platform based on SaaS architecture using a monolithic approach in the design based on WEB solutions. Let me translate from technical terms: we decided to develop a "site in the cloud". This is how the end user will perceive the product: he opens the site, logs in and works with the system.

Criticism multiplied by expertise

Any solution has pros and cons. About the obvious pros: the speed of development, ease of implementation and simplified technical support. Of course, we could not do without minuses: this monolithic architecture (much later we partially converted it to microservices), the dependence of the end user on the quality of the Internet and the complexity of preventive maintenance.

In a short period of time the system we developed turned into a Big Data, accumulating hundreds of gigabytes of information per month. We offered the customer to visualize the data in live dashboards, primarily by disease, to track epidemiological leaps. And this was all three years before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Words instead of numbers, and numbers instead of words

In fact, we work in an environment of aggressive development and strategic responsibility on a national scale. We release 17-20 releases a year with new functionality. A 15-minute server downtime can cost 10,000 worried patients not being able to make an appointment with a doctor.

Today's audience is 29,000 medical users, and the system itself is among the top 3 in Ukraine in terms of functionality. Remark: at the start of the reform there were 8 providers, and now there are 45 different systems. This audience makes it possible to rely on a huge pool of requests, which are laid down in the functionality development strategy, naturally within the framework of eHealth specifications. 

Currently, the project continues to actively develop. Competition on the ISP market requires us to be at the forefront of development, and the team's ability to flexibly adapt to new market demands allows the product to remain one of the leaders in the set and quality of functionality. To be continued

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