Situation
Blyott launched its smart healthcare platform (SHP) offering in 2019. The company has offices in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and Brugge (Belgium). Their main focus is smart Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) solutions for healthcare.
Blyott wanted to launch a new product for a medical niche, that would solve the problem of losing medical assets and by doing so, being able to reduce costs. Estimations indicate that hospitals purchase 10% to 20% more portable equipment than actually required for operational needs. A suitable ‘asset tracking system’ (RTLS) can deliver a substantial ROI (return on investment) with an almost immediate payback time.
It was a crucial requirement that the product was launched with minimal IT overhead and with a high emphasis on security, i.e. a secure and easy to onboard solution with 0 IT footprint on-premises at the hospitals. Another necessity of the product was the operational maintenance and support after delivery through SLA.
Blyott Smart Healthcare Business logic and ETL is done using .NET Core AWS Lambdas. All the data ends up with a blend of DynamoDB and RDS, to keep the data costs minimum and yet offer real-time OLAP functionalities.
Valcon envisioned ELT processes using AWS Glue and AWS Athena as a full-blown OLAP. Alongside a REST API available to integrate the platform with 3rd party solutions or mobile apps, we built a rich Angular web application.
On top of that, we built a bespoken JIRA Service desk solution providing full 24/7 support for Blyott and its end-client, ticketing solution, and phone service.
Approach
Together, we built the Smart Healthcare Platform, which helped hospitals track where hospital materials such as beds, mattresses, pumps, and monitors were at given moments in time. Furthermore, during COVID-19, hospitals indicated the need to see where hospital beds were located, when these were moved, and how often a nurse went into a room with a COVID-19 patient. All of these are features of the Smart Healthcare Platform and are all now made possible. Working in tandem with our creative team, who designed an engaging solution, we planned the technical architecture to be a true Medical IoT solution. By utilising the power of AWS and keeping everything in the Cloud, we ensured the minimal IT overhead requirement.
A key decision was opting for a serverless approach to ensure maximum possible scalability. Further security was ensured by using AWS Cognito and a huge amount of data intake we ensured by connecting AWS IoT service on the intake level, Amazon Kinesis to ensure streaming consistency.
Results
Implementation was done in short print cycles, continuously reviewed together with Blyott. We tested a prototype and got user confirmation of product usability. The solution has been rolled out at multiple hospitals across Europe, and we are planning the roll-out to more hospitals in the near future.
We are continuously providing product research, implementing technology updates, following user interactions, and implementing improvements gathered from the analysis of user behaviour. Due to the AWS Cloud and serverless architecture implementation, the platform can scale endlessly based on the incoming data, ensuring performance while retaining a predictive cost model based on actual usage.
