House of Diagnostics Leverages Sophisticated Monitoring in a Highly Compliant Environment for Superior Digital Experience
House Of Diagnostics (HOD) operates multiple diagnostic centres in Delhi NCR offering Radiology, Pathology, Nuclear Medicine diagnostics including MRI, CT Scan, PET Scan, Blood tests and other tests under one roof. A trusted brand, the company focuses on delivering quality and reliable diagnostic and diagnostic imaging services at an affordable cost.
The company is looking to consolidate its market share and expand its presence in India and globally by leveraging technologically advanced equipment, highly-qualified professionals and maintaining strict control over quality of services.
www.houseofdiagnostics.com
01. Quest to be Game-Changer
The healthcare diagnostic services market is highly fragmented and most set ups are family business catering to the local population. Patients have to wait for long hours to get tests done and sometimes return without doing the tests as they are not adequately prepared. Manual report collection was a pain point, and often patients and relatives make several visits.
HOD wanted to build a standardized and scalable model wherein patients and users can expect certainty in the engagement while experiencing a consistent service level. Considering that there were established players in the market, HOD wanted to differentiate its services with smooth processes including a superb digital experience.
Digital was crucial to bringing about this change in patient experience. Digital is an enabler in the delivery process—both for booking tests and procedures and for accessing reports online. HOD wanted this experience to be flawless to position as a reliable service provider and establish itself as a highly professional organization.
Building and retaining trust was an important objective of HOD’s digital foray. Also, as a healthcare diagnostic services provider dealing with patient information, HOD had to adhere to strict regulatory requirements and wanted a highly compliant environment built on a foundation of programmatic controls, policy automation and continuous monitoring to meet global standards which calls for regular reviews and audits.
Specifically, HOD wanted to achieve the following objectives in its digital play
- Leverage digital as a reliable channel for service delivery
- Deliver superb patient & user experience
- Meet with compliance and regulatory requirements
- Build confidence in its capabilities as a professional service provider
Looking for a partner to deliver these objectives, HOD selected Umbrella after rigorous scrutiny of its technical capabilities and strong reference base.
02. Delivering High Quality Services with Sophisticated Monitoring in a Continuously Compliant Environment
Umbrella designed a highly available infrastructure environment for two critical applications– booking tests and downloading reports—using auto scaled instances; Application Load Balancer; AWS RDS in a three-tiered architecture. However, this robust scalable environment required close monitoring for high performance and continuous compliance.
Umbrella put in place a comprehensive monitoring solution with different approaches to monitor infrastructure, application, and autoscaling using tools and intelligent algorithm. We configured CloudWatch custom metrics to monitor AWS infrastructure and integrated with Site24x7 for advanced monitoring of database such as latency, memory usage, etc. We defined thresholds and exceptions to trigger SMS and email alerts. CloudWatch also monitors Application Load Balancer by providing insights into requests, response time, etc.
As load on application increases during bookings and report downloads, auto scale adds instances. Monitoring scaled instances is tricky as tool must distinguish a faulty instance from that which auto scale has shut down. Site 24×7 tool enables to do this and gracefully deregisters the instance during termination.
We strengthened the monitoring capabilities with AI-powered anomaly detection from Datadog to proactively manage user experience as threshold monitoring alone does not provide comprehensive insights. With Datadog anomaly detection tool dynamic metrics for application behaviour such as throughput, web requests and logins are measured and we are able to get deeper context by analyzing a metric’s historical behaviour to distinguish between normal and abnormal trends.
03. Anomaly Detection with Datadog
The APM enables to establish patterns and variations in user behaviour such as peak times for report downloads during the day and patterns in booking tests during particular days of week or period of the year.
This additional insight enables Umbrella Managed Services team to intervene proactively and optimize application performance when there is an anomaly in volume of traffic even though threshold metrics may not trigger an alert. For example, an anomaly such as unexpected spike for report download during odd hours of the day or when application experiences low traffic volume during peak download time.
The third monitoring solution Umbrella instrumented was to ensure continuous compliance. Considering the sanctity of patient information, we put in place a number of measures including a golden AMI embedding specific security and compliance requirements; scripted environment for programmatic deployment; security groups and IAM based access; configuring AWS CloudWatch, CloudTrail and Config for continuous monitoring. Third-party tool CloudHealth ensures continuous adherence to CIS standards and AWS best practices.
In case of deviation such as an instance launch without golden AMI, AWS Config sends an alert to invoke Lambda which will shut down the non-compliant instance and send SNS notification to Umbrella team about the action taken.
04. Architecture for Continuous Compliance on AWS Cloud
05. HOD Has Established Credibility
HOD has entrenched itself in the market by leveraging digital as a reliable medium. Specifically following benefits have accrued:
- Successfully Launched Digital Initiative: HOD’s digital play is a reliable channel for accessing services with high adoption amongst users.
- Satisfactory User Experience: HOD is able to deliver consistent user experience with proactive problem resolution. Close monitoring and increased visibility enable operations team to identify root cause and resolve before it affects user experience.
- Winning Trust: Continuous policy and regulatory compliance with real-time visibility into vulnerability detection and remediation has reinforced patient confidence in HOD as a credible service provider.
- Reduced Cost of Operations: Fast problem resolution with sophisticated monitoring, programmatic enforcement and continuous monitoring have facilitated lower cost of operations.
