Healthcare Archivy - Page 2 of 2

Web application for ordering medicines online

MediService AG is a company active in the field of healthcare and well-being that was founded in Switzerland over 20 years ago. Main areas of business are the online pharmacy and treatment of chronically ill patients. The services provided include prescription maintenance (in cooperation with doctors and health insurance providers), online medication ordering and their delivery (including items only available outside Switzerland) and individual therapy for chronically ill patients in their own home.

xitee developed and still maintains the web application Kundenkonto, which allows patients or users to create and track orders for medicines online. It is also possible for them to maintain their contact details (e.g. delivery addresses) or available prescriptions. The application was primarily conceived and designed for mobile devices.

KundenKonto consists of 2 parts:

1, User part
a. Registration process
b. Login
c. Password management
d. E-shop operations
i. Selection of a medicine based on a doctor’s prescription
ii. Entering the quantity
iii. Filling in the delivery address
iv. Date of delivery
v. Summary of the order
vi. …..
e. Order management/history
f. Notification
g. User data management
i. E-mail
ii. Address management

2, Administration part (designed for tablet)
a. Registration (Login)
b. User account management
c. Administration and management of medical prescriptions

Technologies: Vaadin 10.0.4 (was later migrated from xitee to Vaadin 14.), Java 8, Tomcat 8.5, Maven 4.0.0, PostgreSQL 9.6., JIRA (Atlassian)

Web application for care consultancy

compass pflegeberatung GmbH is an independent subsidiary of the Association of Private Health Insurance (Verband der Privaten Krankenversicherung = PKV) which fulfills the advisory requirements of all privately insured persons and their relatives. The telephone care advice is open to everyone who needs advice on care. Free and independent. Our team was working on the development of a completely new modern solution (web-application) that allows compass to manage/provide care consultancy in the most effective and user-friendly way.

xitee, together with HBSN Consulting GmbH, supported and accompanied the client compass throughout the entire project, from brainstorming for a user-friendly and intuitive application to the design of application scenarios and the elaboration of technical requirements to the development of the new core application.

woman in black leather jacket using macbook air

The goal of the project was to replace the existing application with a new and modern web and mobile application that would improve the user experience and make it more intuitive. The result was a browser-based application based on Java, Spring Boot, MS SQL and Docker.

This was implemented in a hybrid project management with an interplay of classic and agile procedures. The core application was divided into individual functions that were specified together, taking into account the priority given by compass. This resulted in the content of the backlog for the work packages. Development took place in defined sprints with the aim of delivering an increment after each sprint.

The core application is a completely new development of an individual software, which was specially designed to meet the requirements and wishes of compass. It contains the complete documentation for the care counseling according to § 7a SGB XI and the counseling visits according to § 37 paragraph 3 SGB XI.

The intuitive structure of the system guides the care counselors as users through the entire processes from the creation of new clients in the basic data to making appointments and conducting the counseling on site or on the phone. The versatile functions include, among other things, comprehensive documentation, billing and the creation of invoices, sending of faxes from the system and an associated document management system. Also integrated is the technical solution of a calendar function including synchronization with Outlook. Furthermore, an assessment has been integrated.

For the users, a user-friendly environment and interface is provided in terms of layout and operability for work in the office (web application) and on the move (mobile). Access rights to the individual functionalities have been implemented with a detailed role and authorization concept.

The new development was conducted in 15 months and introduced “in time” in September 2020. Further development to integrate additional functionalities is planned for 2022.

Technologies: Spring Security, OAuth and JWT. Backend is in Java, Gradle, Spring Boot and Hibernate whereas Frontend is in JavaScript and Angular. As API we use Swagger and as servers Tomcat and Nginx. Database used is MS SQL DB Cluster. Realtime search via Elastic.

Platform for secure data transmission

Der Verband der Privaten Krankenversicherung e.V. (PKV) represents the general interests of private health insurance companies. They operate the product called PKV-Konnektor which consists of several web applications.

The “PKV-Konnektor” is a platform for various specialist services. It offers a solution for secure data transmission between member companies and between member companies and the PKV association.

person sitting while using laptop computer and green stethoscope near

Our team created new web applications for PKV-Konnektor called XBRL Konverter and BVA. XBRL Konverter uses Apache POI for parsing and generating excel reports having web frontend created in Vaadin.

The BVA Service is an application for creating, managing and sending reports to BVA (Bundesversicherungsamt).

Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, Vaadin, Spring MVC, JavaScript, Eclipse, Vaadin, JavaScript and Spring Framework, Tomcat and JBoss EAP,DB2, MSSQL, Oracle11g, PostgreSQL

Developed in: Scrum, Kanban

IoT Platform – Medical technology

For our customer specialized in intelligent electronics and security technology, W&H Austria GmbH, we developed a platform based on a technology ThingWorx – a technology that was purpose-built from the ground up for the Internet of Things. It contains the complete set of integrated IoT-specific development tools and capabilities available, offering the industry’s deepest functional competencies.

The purpose of the platform is to monitor and control all the medical devices assigned to the platform and to ensure further service and maintenance of these devices. It also helps the producers to eliminate imperfections and bugs of the devices thanks to the constant monitoring of them.

At the moment, there are three types of devices assigned to the platform – a dentist drill, a drill washer and a sterilizer. All of them are constantly monitored by service operators and in a case of need (a problem or a damage), there is a field technician service available to immediate service and reparation.

In addition, there will be more medical devices successively added to the platform that could be later on used for example in hospitals when monitoring patients (breathing, heartbeat …). Moreover, in the future, the focus of the platform will be broader (not only medical oriented) and there will be more devices on the platform from different fields of industry.

Technologies: ThingWorx, JavaScript, and XML

Online service for creation and management of living wills

Patientenverfügung is a joint initiative of companies HBSN and Mediakom. Both companies are the shareholders of the German Society for Prevention (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Vorsorge) and are actively operating for more than 10 years in the German health sector.

“Patientenverfügung” is an innovative online service for creation and management of living wills enabling to specify which medical treatments should be provided in case of serious illness, brain damage or an injury.

Our team was responsible for development of the web application “PV-Generator” which helps to create and manage these living wills.

The web application “PV-Generator” has been created from the bottom up following the V-Modell developing standard. That includes specifying, implementing, testing and delivering the front-end, back-end and a database of the application.

Technologies: Bootstrap, Javascript, JSP, AJAX, unblu, Novalnet libraries for online payments, Spring MVC, Hibernate, Java 8, Apache Tomcat 8, MySQL 5

Web-based application for the insured

AOK Sachsen-Anhalt is a German health insurance company based in Magdeburg (with another 44 branches in Saxony-Anhalt). With its 750.000 clients, AOK Sachsen-Anhalt represents the market leader in Saxony-Anhalt.

xitee worked together with HBSN AG on the development of a web-based application “GESUNDESKONTO”. With the “GESUNDESKONTO” the AOK offers its customers a budget for additional services such as professional dental cleaning, osteopathy or travel vaccinations which can be applied for and tracked easily, conveniently and quickly via an online portal. Customers can make a contact via the online office in the “GESUNDESKONTO” and find there the range of services and the corresponding provider. After using the services, the insured persons upload their invoices online. These are prechecked by the application and the customer may receive information about errors or missing information. Afterwards the invoice is automatically forwarded to the AOK inventory system, oscare®, and the insured persons will be reimbursed their expenses after a short time.

In this application, customers of AOK Sachsen-Anhalt can check their bonus-status, upload invoice for reimbursement and find other useful functionality like contact details for all branches (and have a chance to check their details and “favorite” them for their personal dashboard). The goal was to create a customer-oriented, user-friendly service saving customers’ time and therefore creating added value.

AOK GESUNDESKONTO was launched on 01.02.2020 after an intensive marketing campaign in Saxony-Anhalt. The individual programming and technical implementation were carried out by the xitee team with a short development time. A special challenge was to integrate “GESUNDESKONTO” into the AOK Saxony-Anhalt’ system oscare®. We are more than happy that our successful cooperation with AOK Saxony-Anhalt continues further since our team is now co-responsible for the support of the GESUNDESKONTO and is developing another functionality for the application.

woman sitting on floor and leaning on couch using laptop

Technologies: JAVA 11, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Flyway, MariaDB Galera Cluster, SonarQube, Tomcat, Spring Security, SAML,/OAuth, 2FA , JWT, Ldap, Spring Data Rest, Spring Integration, Angular 8, RxJS, Apache httpd, Docker, CENTOS/RHEL, JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Maven, JUnit, Jasmin, Selenium

Cloudification

Introduction

Cloud computing, simply put, is the delivery of computing services. That includes servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence over the Internet (“the cloud”) with a clear goal of enabling faster innovation, more flexible usage of resources and economies of scale. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which consequently helps to decrease operating costs, helps to run the infrastructure more efficiently, and scale according to the current needs of your business. Another benefit of cloud is low requirements for pre-investment (it is not necessary to invest in the purchase of HW at the beginning of the project, but it is spread over time).

We provide our customers with cloud consulting services, cloud infrastructure services, cloud application development and cloud application migration services. On top of that we are active in the field of IoT (Internet of Things).

Our cloud migration service can help you move towards digital business operations in the cloud. Migrating your in-house servers including services & applications running on them to the cloud can provide you with several cutting-edge advantages for your business. It is however very crucial to perform the transition properly and according to the specific requirements. As every business has different needs, we also follow a slightly different process for each individual cloud migration.With our cloud-native development, we help you to build and run applications that fully exploit all advantages of the cloud computing model. Our cloud-native computing service uses: open-source software stack to be containerized, dynamically orchestrated and microservices-oriented.

Cloud consulting

Adoption of cloud computing can help you to reduce operational expenses, boost innovation, unlock new possibilities, and realize your strategic IT objectives.

Our cloud consulting service starts with understanding of your current technology landscape, business challenges and goals. We know that our clients have unique needs and are at different levels of maturity on their cloud journey. Therefore we are providing a tailored set of cloud consulting services which support you through your decision-making process and help you to accomplish your business objectives.

Based on the level of the cloud adaption in your company, we can provide following expertise:

Cloud adaption: we ensure that your first steps into public cloud are efficient, smooth and secure. Our experts will help you build a resilient cloud platform.

Migration Assessment: The destination platform could be a public or private cloud infrastructure. We help you to assess the suitability of on-premises machines for migration to cloud. We provide you with correct sizing of VMs (virtual machines) and cost estimates for running infrastructure.

Cloud Optimization: We analyze your cloud infrastructure, detect under- and over-provisioned instances and idle resources, and identify security gaps to remove performance bottlenecks and lower your cloud computing costs.

Cloud strategy: It’s no longer about looking at one application or a specific part of the business, but how to transform your whole company, help it to to develop faster and be more efficient than the competition.

Cloud migration

Before the cloud migration begins, it is important to establish its goals. The migration goals are individual for every company. For one company it could be an increase of the performance of an application or enabling new services. Other company might expect cost savings or relieving the IT department from application support duties.

The other important concern when establishing cloud migration goals is to agree when the old infrastructure has to be terminated.

After migration goals are agreed on, the company focuses on creating a security strategy. The ultimate objectives for a security of the organization don’t change with the introduction/implementation of cloud services, but the way how those objectives will be achieved is going to be modified. Security teams must still focus on reducing business risk from attacks and focus on getting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability assurances built into all information systems and data. Cloud cybersecurity requires a different approach compared to the on-premises security. In the cloud environment, corporate assets are no longer protected by an on-premise firewall, and the network perimeter basically does not exist.

When a company becomes confident with security assurances, it is time to choose a suitable cloud provider and to copy the data over. This should be done continually throughout the migration process so that the cloud data remains up-to-date. There are many tools which support migration of complete servers as well as the individual databases.

The most complex part of the process is then moving the company application including their business intelligence. This part might involve refactoring or rewriting the code.

After a proper testing and verification, the last step of the process is to switch the production from on-premise to the cloud.

Cloud-native development

With our cloud-native development, we help you to build and run applications that fully exploit all advantages of the cloud computing model

Our cloud native computing uses an open-source software stack to be:

Containerized: every part (applications, processes, etc.) is packaged in its separate container. This eases the reproducibility, transparency, and resource isolation.
Dynamically orchestrated: containers are actively scheduled and managed to optimize resource utilization.
Microservices-oriented: segmentation of the applications into microservices, which greatly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications.

Among the main advantages of cloud native development belong:

avoiding high initial costs with pay-as-you-go model. No initial infrastructure investment needed
reducing the time-to-market with optimized infrastructure setup, CI/CD delivery & deployment
innovative technology – cloud application platforms are exposed to the latest technology, such as big data, AI (artificial intelligence), IoT (Internet of Things), etc.
global scale – ability to scale elastically according to the needs. Start small but be ready to grow big
ensuring high availability & reliability – cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity easier and less expensive

The main challenges for organizations connected to the cloud native development are:

optimization of the infrastructure costs
selection of the perfect technology cloud set-up
the need of building of DevOps culture

Atlassian products in xitee

xitee has had a rich experience with Atlassian products since 2007. Atlassian products (especially Jira and Confluence as well as Plugin`s) are key systems for xitee and cover all processes in many areas – it is not only Software development or Service management, but also the HR management and ISO management including internal documentation. All Atlassian products that we use are completely and directly managed by xitee IT Operations (hosting, installation, configuration, customization, monitoring, …). IT Operations is a crucial part of xitee. A team of 8 highly qualified people covers almost all areas of IT Operations, and nursing of Atlassian ecosystem is one them.

List of Atlassian application what we use (sizing included)

Jira Software + Core (more than 70 projects, 20 000+ issues)
Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk)
Confluence (60 spaces, 3 000 pages)
Bitbucket (50 repositories)
Bamboo (80 jobs)

We have been continuously improving our Atlassian stack using plugins, custom settings including custom workflows, issue types, screens, notification schemes, user macros etc. We are also using automation within Jira – for example custom parser of emails to extract the information and fill in into issue fields. In total we use around 15 plugins – the following are the major ones with highest added value for xitee:

Tempo Timesheets-Time Tracking & Reports for JIRA
Time to SLA for JIRA (more possibilities for SLA tracking)
Zephyr Scale – Test Management for Jira
ScriptRunner for Jira and Confluence (automation)
Reminder for Jira – Follow Up Issues
Table Filter and Charts for Confluence

We have experience with retrieving information from the Jira database to MS Excel and with direct interaction with Jira via api.

Intranet in Confluence (was realized without any expensive plugin)

Cloud computing

There are three main service models of cloud computing – often visualized in a pyramid where each level of the service model is more specialized than the one before, but it is built on the same basic structure. The one at the bottom (IaaS) is more versatile and customizable fitting to many applications, the one at the top (SaaS) is more specialized and fitting to specific tasks.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)  is similar to traditional computer hardware (servers, networks, operating systems), but instead of buying the physical hardware, company can purchase the infrastructure as a virtual service through an IaaS provider. These resources are usually easy to scale and offer the customer a complete control over the infrastructure. Examples of IaaS include Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) stands for a platform allowing companies to develop, run, and manage solutions without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure that is typically connected with developing and launching an app. Developers can therefore focus on the software without having to manage operating systems, software updates, and other infrastructure matters. PaaS examples include Microsoft Azure, the Google App Engine.
Software as a Service (SaaS) represents a complete software solution which you purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider. Put simply, you rent the use of the particular solution for your organization. Instead of having to install the solution, the users can connect to it over the Internet, usually with a web browser. All of the underlying infrastructure, middleware, app software, and app data are located in the service provider’s data center. The service provider manages the hardware and software, and ensures the availability and security of the app and your data. Examples of SaaS include Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite.

Today, the basic division is often enhanced by a fourth dimension – FaaS, going even more specific.

Function as a Service (FaaS) allows customers to execute code responsively without having to allocate processing resources ahead of time. It enables the customers to develop, to run and to manage application functionalities without the need to build and maintain complex infrastructures. This way of app development is often used when building microservices applications and it enables the achievement of the so-called serverless architecture. FaaS examples are AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions.

Another way to divide cloud computing is based on the deployment model.

Cloud deployment describes where the infrastructure for the deployment is hosted and who has access and control to it. There are four deployment models:

Private cloud – an exclusive cloud for the organization, can be on-premise but also off premise
Public cloud – cloud infrastructure is available to the general public and it is owned by the company selling cloud services
Community cloud – the cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns
Hybrid cloud – the cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public)

This division of clouds defines also the deployment strategy used.

Our cloud migration service can help you move towards digital business operations in the cloud. Migrating your in-house servers including services & applications running on them to the cloud can provide you with several cutting-edge advantages for your business. It is however very crucial to perform the transition properly and according to the specific requirements. As every business has different needs, we also follow a slightly different process for each individual cloud migration. With our cloud-native development, we help you to build and run applications that fully exploit all advantages of the cloud computing model. Our cloud-native computing service uses: open-source software stack to be containerized, dynamically orchestrated and microservices-oriented.