An electronic health record (EHR) system has a major role to play in ensuring proper healthcare to students at schools. School nurses can use the electronic health record system to collect, track and manage student healthcare information. Digitization of health records using EHR systems allows the school to provide the utmost medical care to the students. It also reduces paperwork and makes it easier for school nurses to take care of the health of all the students at school. A popular EHR application used in schools across the US embarked on its cloud journey with the help of Nuvento’s cloud solutions. 

The challenge

A SharePoint-based EHR application was enough for keeping student healthcare information at schools until the pandemic. The world was not prepared for Covid-19 and so were most schools. It showed the necessity of being up to date with the latest technology to ensure student well-being and make timely interventions.

The company wanted to take the initiative by modernizing the EHR application to step up for the job when the schools reopened amidst the pandemic. Nuvento’s cloud team took up the task of modernizing the platform building a SAAS application on the cloud. The tasks included building the application on the cloud, migrating the existing databases, and modernizing the application with added features and functionalities. 

Our Solution 

After assessing various factors like pricing, security, efficiency, and compatibility, our cloud experts proposed a multitenant SAAS solution for the EHR app with Azure cloud. This was the best choice as Azure utilized most of the common models and technology frameworks that the EHR application required.

The readymade services like APIs and templates, flexible environment, and compatibility with Microsoft frameworks makes the migration convenient.  

Some of the capabilities of Azure used for developing the application include: 

With Azure Web App we could build the app without the cost overhead of deployment, configuration, and maintenance of separate virtual machines.  The Web Application Firewall (WAF) in Azure API Gateway provides centralized protection to the application from common vulnerabilities. Continuous integration and continuous deployment with Azure DevOps allow faster and near-zero downtime deployments. 

Azure functions apps allow to incorporate functionalities like handling parents’ requests, enabling parent-nurse communication, scheduling tasks, etc.  The authentication and accessibility tiers include the nurses’ login and the parent logins. Mongo DB under different collections and Azure Blob storage is used to store data that can scale out if required. 

Key Outcomes

The greatest benefit of moving from on-premises to Azure is the availability and scalability that the application now has. Being hosted on the Azure cloud also makes it easier to take the EHR application to an international level and accommodate growth.

Performance including speed, responsiveness, usability, and user experience has shown considerable improvement.

• Average Response Time of the application is around 58. 57 milliseconds.
• With High availability of around 99.8 %, the application can be accessed from anywhere at any time.
• Automatic scalability of around 80% lets the app scale-out new instances dynamically if the load increases.
• Productivity of the nurses has improved by 20 % due to seamless data management and simplified communication with the EHR app on Azure cloud.
• Security and Compliance features of Azure provide an added level of security to the app, data, network, and infrastructure by taking care of all vulnerabilities.
• Customize features on-demand and integrate new modules like covid tracking seamlessly web with near-zero outages.
• Cost of operation has been optimized to pay only for what they use and saved about 25% of the expenditure compared to on-premises.