E2E patient payment system improves data collection, categorization, and analysis with AWS native tooling

Healthcare & Life Science

Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization

AWS Foundations

Migrations

By leveraging AWS native tooling, PatientPay realized improvements in data collection, categorization, and data analysis. Coupled with improvements to their AWS architecture, their product now scales effortlessly while being more resilient and robust.

PatientPay is a leading end-to-end patient payment solution focused on the complex financial challenges facing specialty healthcare. The company offers payment solutions for patients, medical groups, hospitals and revenue cycle management groups that deliver a full suite of products and services designed for today’s healthcare needs. PatientPay partners with specialty care medical groups and revenue cycle management (RCM) companies to capture patient payments during every step of care.

Challenge

PatientPay is rapidly growing as a company. While their existing Kubernetes infrastructure lives on AWS, it was inefficient and difficult to manage. They decided they wanted to modernize their environment to leverage microservices and data processing, while also ensuring that as they grew, they would be able to remain HIPAA and PCI Level 1 compliant and keep security policies aligned with AWS best practices.

After discovery calls with the Caylent team, PatientPay opted to begin a modernization transformation to leverage Amazon EKS, automate PCI and HIPAA compliant infrastructure, modernize their data tooling, and ensure PatientPay’s current and future environment are optimized for performance and cost.

Solution

PatientPay had an existing multi-account organization but was missing critical AWS foundational tooling. Caylent implemented our AWS Control Tower Caylent Catalyst™ to improve their multi-account infrastructure in accordance with AWS best practices by leveraging organization-level CloudTrails, SSO, IAM permission boundaries, and other best-in-class tooling needed to support healthcare and financial services compliance requirements. This implementation also provided their engineers easy and secure access to different environments and allowed PatientPay to leverage consolidated billing and set billing alerts and thresholds. Caylent worked closely with PatientPay to determine the best OU structure for the new account while ensuring the infrastructure would allow PatientPay to remain HIPAA and PCI compliant.

Next, PatientPay engaged Caylent to develop the underlying infrastructure, pipelines, and environment for their Amazon EKS microservices, migrate them and improve the company’s data process. The team built PatientPay’s Amazon EKS pipelines with Terraform IAC hosted in AWS CodeCommit. The new microservices were first tested in qualification environments before winning executive buy-in to move to production. After a successful migration to production, PatientPay has continued to engage Caylent to move an additional set of 55+ microservices to Amazon EKS, support adopting new CI/CD tooling (ArgoCD and Jenkins), implement standard compliance tooling, improve resilience, and leverage spot instances for select Amazon EKS workloads. Caylent is also supporting their move to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) for data streaming, simplifying PatientPay’s data operations and analysis outputs while also providing the tooling necessary to grow their product in the future. As a result, aggregate log costs have been reduced by decreasing reliance on external third party tooling and leveraging AWS native services.

The partnership also takes a strategic focus, leveraging Caylent Pods to provide a standard for application deployment into Amazon EKS and integrating AWS tooling to help ensure compliance requirements are maintained. Additionally, Caylent has been able to scale our Pod’s elasticity to meet PatientPay’s needs at any time, changing the total number of engineers as the project evolved.

Result

By leveraging AWS native tooling for data streaming (Amazon MSK), PatientPay was able to realize improvements in data collection, categorization, and data analysis through better insights into their customer’s activities and a more reliable data stream. This, coupled with improvements to their AWS infrastructure and microservices architecture, allows their product to scale effectively while being more resilient and robust. Leveraging AWS-managed services for their data streaming allows PatientPay to offload difficult manual DevOps tasks and build on more resilient infrastructure allowing the team to spend more time focusing on business-critical projects. Finally, by using AWS’s open source Karpenter scheduler and Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet, Caylent was able to help the customer achieve meaningful cost savings on workloads where compute is required in short bursts.

PatientPay is in a significantly stronger position after partnering with Caylent in several areas. Their AWS foundational infrastructure will securely scale with their growth and has security policies aligned with AWS best practices in place. Leveraging Amazon EKS and microservices, PatientPay now has product development flexibility and resilient infrastructure that is critical to stay competitive, provide quality customer experiences, and be a leader within their industry. Caylent was also able to leverage Jumpstart funding for PatientPay to enable this modernization and MAP funding for the microservices migration effort.