Telenotarzt moves to AWS Cloud to embrace life-saving potential

Aachen, 2020/05/19 – Telehealth includes the use of telecommunications and digital technology transforms health care outside of traditional health care facilities. The umlaut Telenotarzt Tele Medic is available for emergency team members at any time during emergencies and patient transport. The medical staff communicates in real time via audio and video and with access to the patients live vital-signs. The goal of the Telenotarzt-Service is to move information instead of doctors. umlaut supports this effort by removing technical barriers and brings the lifesaving service into the cloud.

Cloud makes telehealth more secure and reliable

Processing, storing, and transmitting protected health information (PHI) in live and death situations does not allow any margin for errors. The telehealth care sector is highly regulated by law. For fulfilling the given requirements not every cloud service is feasible. Amazon Web Service (AWS) provides secure architecture that is usable on government and health-sector level. AWS was our choice of tooling by offering services that are pay-as-you-go, no contractual lock-in for our solution and at the same time participating in a great AWS Partner Network (APN). With services that automate security and compliance like AWS CloudWatch, their shared responsibility model and the knowledge umlaut gained by working in the health and governmental sector we could secure the application further. Just by choosing AWS as a provider with more than 1800 security controls which automatically protect the Telenotarzt services.

AWS enables the Telenotarzt service for up to 7.5 million people

Since April 2014 more than 20.000 emergency patients were treated with the assistance of Telenotarzt service. Until the end of 2022 the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia intents to open it up to 7.5 million people.

To be ready for this dimension, the it-infrastructure of Telenotarzt needed to be fitted accordingly. Telenotarzt need scalable infrastructure for being ready at the right time, regardless of whether covers a city, a region, or an entire state. Moving from a local on-premise model to a cloud-based solution is the necessary step indeed. In need for the full potential that the cloud of AWS offers:

The process, approach, and tools for migrating workloads to cloud has been provided by umlaut in consulting and development. Migration has been done in a lift and shift approach.

The lift and shift method use the same architecture constructs even after the migration to the cloud takes place. In effect there Is no significant changes required in terms of the business processes associated with the application as well as monitoring and management interfaces. By using a step-by-step plan to move the application data in to right Amazon Service the database has seamlessly been migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). After the RDS migration, the other individual services used by the Telenotarzt followed e.g. Call-Functionality.

From advice that is doable as a starting point to real-end-to-end cloud delivery

Step by step, and well planned without service interruption the application has now been completely embedded in a cloud-native architecture. To gain more agility umlaut is moving service to number of microservices in the future. With these changes in mind Telenotarzt service will be enabled a continuing and innovational growth.

How the cloud enables predictive rescuing

With the preRESC project umlaut even adds something more: Doing so by combined analysis of mobility, health and structural data by combining our knowledge from the fields of digitization, telecommunication and connectivity. Based in the AWS cloud which brings unprecedented levels of scalability, flexibility, and agility, umlaut is able to predict where the next emergency response is likely to occur. All this in order to ultimately save more lives.