Social Network for Health Care Providers
Our client provides a social network for nearly one million US health care providers, connecting them with peers, clinically relevant content by specialty, and brands and product manufacturers within the health care field. They engaged Lineate to update a legacy content management platform whose scale and complexity had resulted in slow delivery of new features, fragmented data, and excessive hosting cost.
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Service:
- Application Modernization
Share:
Service:
- Application Modernization
Problem
This social network for health care professionals uses custom marketing solutions. After experiencing a sudden 70 percent decrease in ad impressions after introducing measures to block invalid traffic, our client realized they needed to modernize their application stack to be more agile.
The platform architecture was decentralized across 22 Drupal installations and built on top of a legacy third-party platform. The rapid growth of users and brands on the platform had brought underlying architectural issues to the surface: Maintenance was time-consuming, the rollout of new features was slow, and critical data was fragmented and often stale. The application was hosted on an end-of-life platform with no tools for deployment and no automation. Overall, the application was expensive to maintain and inflexible.
Solution
We built a centralized campaign management tool using serverless components on AWS, which managed the 22 sites with a consistent set of physician data. We also updated the existing sites, streamlining the technology, adding features, automating the infrastructure, and tightening security.
We began by redesigning and consolidating the contacts database and migrating it from MySQL to PostgreSQL. We then redesigned the data pipelines and extract, transform, load (ETL) processing to ensure two-way data consistency across complex data entity instances.
We then moved the legacy PHP applications to a serverless architecture on AWS. We created REST APIs as lambda functions in Node.js and an upgraded user experience built in Vue.js.
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Features
Modern, responsive, single-page campaign management application to manage all contacts and user sites in a centralized way
- Multiple ways to deliver information to doctors, including showing ads, sending emails, making phone calls, or even delivering packages
- Two-way synchronization with doctor communities
Serverless infrastructure and automation scripts that could redeploy on development, staging, and production environments with the push of a button
Modern Architecture
- Built a headless content management system (CMS) on serverless cloud functions
- Centralized the database
- Reused as much as possible
Security patches and regular security scans to keep new software up to date
Results
The application has become easily maintainable due to clear and structured code, deployed in a pure serverless environment. Time for feature rollout has been reduced by 50 percent, along with an average 40 percent decrease in month-to-month hosting costs. Usage and engagement metrics have become both measurable and predictable. Advertising impressions have been recovered to previous levels. The administrative interface is now fast and intuitive and is used by marketers with little to no training.
Tech stack
We leveraged a robust tech stack that included AWS Lambda and API Gateway for serverless architecture, AWS Glue and ElasticSearch for ETL and data search, along with Vue 3 and TypeScript for front-end development. The back-end was powered by Node.js and Python, and data storage was managed using PostgreSQL.
