How We Helped SMA Create a Comprehensive Business Management System
State Medical Assistance (SMA) is a healthcare organisation based in Australia that specialises in providing ambulance services to various hospitals across the country. Their primary focus is on ensuring prompt and reliable transportation for patients in need of urgent medical care. As an essential component of the healthcare infrastructure, SMA is committed to delivering high-quality and compassionate ambulance services. They prioritise patient safety, accessibility, and efficient operations to meet the needs of individuals requiring urgent medical attention.
SMA's dedication to excellence is reflected in their ongoing efforts to optimise their IT infrastructure, enhance service capabilities, and streamline operations. By leveraging technology and strategic partnerships, SMA aims to continuously improve their service delivery and provide the best possible care to patients in need.
Understanding the critical role of IT in delivering efficient ambulance services, SMA sought a partner capable of delivering superior IT solutions. SMA made a strategic choice to shift their IT service provider and entrust their IT operations to Intergy for improved services.
Since 2013, State Medical Assistance (SMA), has been specialising in the provision of Patient Transport, On-Site & Event Medical and Clinical Governance. With their experienced and qualified operational, customer service and leadership team, they deliver high quality, safe, flexible, patient centred and value for money in health care.
Their vision takes form as a 100% Australian owned health care organisation which operates across NSW, VIC, WA and ACT in Australia and leads the market in service quality, safety, clinical governance, and compliance. SMA is ISO 9001, 14001, 22301, 45001 and 27001 certified.
SMA faced several challenges stemming from their previous IT provider, resulting in technical debts that impeded their operations. The existing application exhibited over 100 unresolved issues, which required immediate attention and rectification. Additionally, SMA aimed to expand their business capabilities to operate efficiently across different time zones in Australia. They also sought a more streamlined billing process based on contractual agreements with new hospitals and desired a shared planner for better coordination across hospitals.
From an infrastructure point of view, SMA's solution architecture was already in Azure and their existing infrastructure provider, Cubesys, enhanced and supported it prior to Intergy's involvement.
The Solution
Software and Infrastructure Audit Process
- Security
- Scalability
- Performance
- High Availability
- Maintainability
- Stability
- Standards
WHAT WERE SMA'S MAIN PAIN POINTS?
SMA approached Intergy with the focus on the following areas:
- Strategic planning - SMA was looking to develop or refine their strategic technology plan to achieve their business goals and improve performance.
- Growth & Expansion - SMA were seeking ways to expand their business, increase revenue, or enter new markets via enhanced and market-leading functionality.
- Operational efficiency - SMA also wanted to improve their operational processes., reduce costs, and increase productivity.
- Technology and digital transformation - SMA were looking to adopt new technologies, such as Azure cloud modernisation and automation, to streamline operations or improve customer experiences.
WHAT DOES THE APPLICATION NEED TO DO?
- The web application is used to facilitate the bookings from the wards/locations to transport the patients. It has various modules such as Dashboard, Transport Scheduling, Vehicle trip estimation, Location configuration, Users, User Profiles etc.
- Driver application is used to assign a vehicle, check, and update progress through the trip.
- Nurse Station app shows the list of Transfers needs to be done from the hospital order by the scheduled time.
- TV app is a single dashboard page which shows the status of the bookings, vehicles, and their locations.
Solutions Consulting
Taking over the IT responsibilities for SMA, Intergy embarked on a comprehensive approach to address their challenges and fulfill their requirements.
Resolving Technical Debts
Intergy meticulously identified and resolved over 100 issues within SMA's existing application, rectifying the technical debts accumulated from the previous IT provider. This measure ensured system stability and reliability.
System Enhancements
- We successfully implemented system enhancements that enabled SMA to conduct seamless operations across different time zones, ensuring efficient ambulance services around the clock.
- Our team developed new billing models tailored to SMA's needs. These models enable SMA to accurately bill new hospitals based on contractual agreements, ensuring transparency and efficiency.
- Recognizing the importance of efficient trip coordination, we introduced a shared planner feature, facilitating better collaboration and coordination across different hospital trips.
Infrastructure Improvements
- We worked closely with Cubesys to enhance SMA's application infrastructure, focusing on performance optimization and reliability. This collaboration ensured a smooth user experience for SMA personnel and the hospitals they serve.
- In response to SMA's evolving needs, we are currently in discussions to propose and develop a high availability system. This system will further enhance SMA's operations by ensuring uninterrupted service provision to hospitals, even during critical scenarios.
Microsoft Azure Architecture & Solution
The following Azure services were used to provide the optimal cloud solution for the application to operate:
- Azure Regions & Availability Zones - In deploying SMA application within Azure ecosystems, the services leveraged by the geo-regional presence of Azure’s data centres, within Australia.
- Events and Monitoring - The monitoring and logging of events from Azure resources are critical to ensure the SMA application meets regulatory, functional, security, commercial and performance requirements. The metrics, triggers and alerts are stored and collected using Log Analytics for centralised reporting and production troubleshooting.
- Azure Key Vault - All the keys, secrets and passwords are stored securely in Key Vault and accessed through the application.
- Release and Change Management - Intergy Consulting took full advantage of Azure DevOps and Boards. Intergy setup full CI/CD pipeline using Azure Repos. Azure Boards were used for project management, with customised (and best practice) status categorisation. This helped us to improve the DevOps process and significantly reduced the deployment time and the task delivery. Additionally, SMA had full visibility of tasks, current status, deployments, history, repo commits and roll back procedures. All of these factors added to SMA’s confidence in the development and deployment process followed by Intergy.
- Azure Public DNS -All DNS required for the application is managed with Azure Public DNS.
- Azure App Service Plans, App Services, Function Apps - All these resources define the region, operating system, compute and memory resources that an app service or function app operate within. The app service plan and associated apps were deployed in multiple regions with the published application, configuration and scaling plans, providing the necessary resilience to the solution.
- Azure SignalR - This is a particular service used in SMA to communicate between the backend (server) and frontend (UI). Azure SignalR Service allows to add a real-time web functionality to applications over HTTP/S. Therefore clients are updated without the need to poll the server or submit entire new HTTP/S requests for updates.
- Azure SQL Database - The use of Azure SQL Database service helped us in optimising the performance, provided high availability and backups. Azure SQL Database also provides useful in-built diagnosis tools for troubleshooting performance issues.
- Azure Front Door - Azure Front Door services were used to provide users with fast and reliable performance using content delivery networks and geographical routing to ensure the user is connected to the closest region where the application is deployed.
Key Takeaways
Technologies
- .Net, React UI, React Native, SQL Server, Azure Infrastructure.
Integrations
- Tom Tom Webfleet, MIMS, Snomed, Sendgrid, Google Maps, Datadog.
- The expertise of the Intergy team in these technologies and integrations has played a crucial role in the successful running of the application. Our proficiency ensures a seamless integration of various components, optimal performance, and the ability to leverage the full potential of these technologies and integrations to meet the specific needs of the healthcare industry.
Results and Benefits
- The collaboration between SMA and Intergy yielded significant results and benefits: Resolution of Technical Debts: Over 100 issues within the existing application were successfully addressed, eliminating obstacles, and improving system stability.
- Enhanced Business Capabilities: SMA can now operate seamlessly across different time zones, providing efficient ambulance services around the clock.
- Improved Infrastructure: Collaborative efforts improved SMA’s application infrastructure, resulting in enhanced performance and reliability for a smoother user experience.
- Future High Availability System: The proposal and development of a high availability system will further bolster SMA’s operations, ensuring uninterrupted service provision to hospitals.
Conclusion
Through our partnership with SMA, we successfully resolved technical debts, implemented essential enhancements, and optimized the application infrastructure. The improvements made by our team have significantly strengthened SMA’s IT capabilities, allowing them to provide top-notch ambulance services across Australia. Our ongoing collaboration underscores our commitment to supporting SMA’s mission of delivering high-quality medical assistance.
