How do you take an award-winning Healthcare Platform and bring it to the next level for an emerging market of connected devices and digital healthcare? This goal was and continues to be, the challenge motivating the CloudMine Product Team.
The evolution of the Connected Health Cloud has been our primary focus for the last 12 months, and it started with a challenge. After winning the 2017 CODIE Award for Best Digital Health Platform, we were tasked with determining how to make it better. We were asked to enhance the product both visually and functionally to support our customers’ ever-growing needs in solving healthcare’s most difficult problems. We started with the user interface and customer experience, followed that by addressing interoperability needs, and rounded out the initiative with enhanced organization application management and security. Oh, and for good measure, we incorporated new tools to monitor application metrics and usage as well.
Enterprise Ready Healthcare Information Security
A central aspect of any enterprise application development project is refined and customizable permissions (especially within healthcare). To address this need, the CloudMine team took a hard look at the backbone of our product and revised the way we look at Organizations. In the Connected Health Cloud, each Organization will now own all of its own applications, rather than an individual user, providing centralized security and peace of mind. We introduced the concept of an Organization Owner, with the ability to manage all members and applications.
Nested under these Organization Owners are teams and team members. In this way, Organization Owners will now be able to create Teams within their Organization to implement custom permissions and access schemas based on employee function. This feature enables more granular provisioning of application access and allows team members to access the information they need to perform critical functions within the Organization, without the ability to impact or view data that is outside of their function. To its core, the Connected Health Cloud provides your Organization with the tools needed to protect against the unauthorized use or disclosure of your sensitive data.
User Experience
#1. Navigation
Customer experience is at the top of the list when developing new functionality. CloudMine has carefully considered our customers’ daily use of our product, interacting both with our dashboard UI and our API. Our first focus was navigation. Updates were made to bring our navigation strategy in line with practices used by other familiar developer tools that our partners use. It starts with the kernel at the top left of the dashboard; this top-level navigation allows users to know where they are in the dashboard at all times and easily navigate between applications, hosted sites, and their organization as a whole. Updates were also made to individual sections within the dashboard, focusing on clean, functional design.
#2. Logic Engine
As an essential piece of the product, CloudMine’s Logic Engine empowers rapid deployment of code packages and operationalization of custom business logic. Now, this service offers the ability to easily set environment variables and enables self-service Node version selection. Want to update your environment variables or deploy a new version of your application with an updated Node or Java environment? Not a problem. The revised UI and API make this easy, transparent, and seamlessly integrated with your build pipeline.
#3. Customer Success
Development is never straightforward and, on occasion, questions arise that simply cannot be answered via documentation. Our new “Got Feedback” widget facilitates real-time communications with our dedicated client support and success team. Use the widget to log bugs, file enhancement requests, or share other comments you have for us! Seamlessly integrated with our service desk, we can track, reply and iterate quickly based on your feedback. Haven’t used our service desk before? There is no better way to collaboratively develop with our team and get your questions answered.
Application Usage
Understanding your application(s) usage is critical to making meaningful business decisions and a step towards the future of analytics, an important key to unlocking digital healthcare success. The Connected Health Cloud introduces both API routes and a user interface with visualizations that enable critical insights into your application’s performance. With the ability to view multiple applications across your organization, you are equipped with the knowledge necessary to inform decisions that impact your organization and users. The metrics present not only real-time data, but also provide historical context and a high watermark across the life of the application. Customers can also easily download these metrics to run against business strategies or custom analytics.
Metrics included in this feature are:
- API Call Count
- Avg. API Calls per Second
- Avg. API Call Round Trip Time
- Data Storage Total in GB
- File Storage Total in GB
- User Count
- Active User Count – Last 30 Days
- Application Count
Integrations Engine
Developer tools, application insights, and a refined user experience are all important aspects of an Enterprise Health Cloud, but none match the importance and relevance of access to healthcare data. CloudMine’s Integrations Engine is a custom feature for integrating important healthcare data within your application using the industry’s most cutting-edge tools. Currently, we offer seamless integrations with Redox, for integrating EHR and FHIR healthcare data, and Validic, for integrating IoT and connected healthcare device data. All of this is wrapped in our HIPAA-compliant security best practices. Using these tools, the possibilities for creating meaningful healthcare solutions, now, is limitless. And this is just the beginning. We have plans to extend the capabilities of this framework beyond these two integrations to further our customers’ and partners’ desire to improve patient outcomes and advance the future of healthcare research.
Beth is Cloudmineinc’s senior health editor and a certified personal trainer. She has over 10 years experience as a science journalist and is the author of two books. She deadlifts over 315 lbs.