SUCCESS CASE
Develop a microservices‑based Middleware
About RBdigital
RBdigital, a Previmedical group company, offers healthcare facilities digital services for the management of patients. The mission is to modernize practice management systems and potential interoperability and access for healthcare facilities.
RBdigital chose Mia-Care to migrate from a monolithic architecture to a microservices-based ecosystem for improving data interoperability and communication among several internal factories dealing with invoices and insurance claims. They also leveraged the Mia-Care Back Office to create custom CRM suites for several care partners that expose availabilities from several care structures and healthcare professionals to improve the width of accessible services.
Benefits and KPIs
+600
Care Partners
onboarded
+1K
Healthcare providers
involved
2x
Practice management
performance
2x
Refunding process
speed
The Need
The initial monolithic architecture was not designed for rapid partner channel integration and made communication between internal factories difficult. Reservations and billing were handled over the phone by the Contact Center, which receives the request from final clients and routes it to partner care facilities.
RBdigital needed to adopt a digital platform designed to assemble and combine packaged business capabilities by maximizing reusability, modularity, and integration with third-party components. The company was also looking to digitalize the end‑user experience by improving user retention and heterogeneity of available care services to increase revenues.
The Challenge
RBdigital decided to write off its old technology to leverage a cloud-based microservices architecture. The strategic decision raised several business challenges:
- Onboard expensive cloud-native experts to develop a digital platform from scratch;
- Minimize time-to-market and take advantage of the demands
of an increasingly pushing market; - Achieve flawless interoperability with existing IT systems and create a receptive gateway for future integrations;
- Rely on easy customization and have the strength to scale quickly to meet new market challenges.
The Solution
RBdigital had to decide whether to build the new digital platform from a green field by acquiring dedicated cloud-native tech experts or buy different off-the-shelf products to create a mix of solutions that fulfill the initial requirements. If the first option would guarantee complete control, expenses and operational risk could be very high. The latter option can be good for reaching the desired market very quickly. However, it lacks product customization and scaling.
IT Team and the Management understood that the perfect solution for maintaining a high stake in the new product without losing control of personalization and scaling over time was leveraging the modular software suite provided by Mia-Care.
Microservices-based Middleware
Mia-Care and RBdigital developed a microservices-based Middleware to enable communication among different Factories and create a single entry point for managing all the digital services to interact with care structures. The new software layer allows to:
- Create new Back End functionalities and expose them via API using Mia-Care ready-to-use plugin from the Marketplace
- Design new Front End applications using Mia-Care Back Office that perfectly interact with ready‑to‑use plugins from the Marketplace
- Enrich functionalities that already exists using Mia-Platform Console
- Develop new plugins and add them to the Marketplace for sharing with the whole IT internal factory
Administrative Back Office for Care Partners
Before the intervention of Mia-Care, RBdigital provided the partner network of care structures with a free CRM to manage patients and availabilities. However, the software did not allow easy integration with digital touchpoints and had a poor user experience that was not helping Administrative staff to keep up with the pace of requests. The new CRM based on Mia-Care Back Office is very user-friendly and characterized by an intuitive and modern interface. The business features included are the following:
- Claims dossier management
- Management of health facility pricing schedule
- Doctors Management
- Teleconsultation
- Patient Health Record
- User and Profile Management
- Management of healthcare facilities
The Impact
Conceiving and building a new modular architecture based on cloud-native technology impacts the business in several ways:
- Holistic: any project or initiative is seen as an incremental section of a comprehensive ecosystem designed for welfare needs
- Organizational: bridging traditional silos and establishing a Platform Team to lead the roadmap and future implementation
- Evolutionary: the platform is a living layer changing over time to augment the Systems of Records
- Inclusive and innovative: easy to integrate third parties for value-added services and for improving the user experience
- Governed: security and compliance by design, convention over configuration paradigm
- Flexible: Ease of customization, deployment, and Ability to develop multiple integrated solutions for different purposes
Why Mia-Care
RBdigital found in Mia-Care the right partner to build its comprehensive clinical platform dedicated to creating and managing personalized prevention plans for assisted people. The quality of software code and the processes that led to the final delivery relied on four main pillars.
DATA INTEROPERABILITY
Through the development of a request-based software layer and a Gateway API, it was possible to build Middleware capable of interoperating data from different systems with each other and exposing them on digital touchpoints.
INTEGRATION
The Gateway API-based Middleware makes it easy to integrate the systems of the care providers with the portal dedicated to the users of health services (payers). The new architecture can expose free slots in specialists’ agendas, enabling the end user to book a service without having to pass through the call center.
RELIABILITY
Mia-Care Back Office is an easy-to-use and intuitive tool used dually: on the one hand, Previdigital can easily configure the new services available to patients; on the other hand, facilities can manage the entire workflow, from service registration to outstanding contracts and billing.
MODULAR APPROACH
The great flexibility provided by a modular approach allows for rapid scaling up by configuring new services organized in modules. These can be turned on and off on-demand as needed, and contribute to enriching the range of services available (e.g., integration of FHIR data models, activation of teleconsultation or payment function).
“We have chosen Mia-Care to modernize our IT systems by switching from a monolithic approach to a microservices-based architecture. This led us to flawless operations among IT factories and an efficient way to integrate care partners within our welfare ecosystem”.
REMO QUINTINO – COO @ RBDIGITAL