4PatientCare modernizes application and improves patient experience with migration to Google Cloud

September, 2022

4PatientCare migrated to Google Cloud with the help of MediaAgility, now part of Persistent Systems, to modernize applications and deliver better communication solutions to healthcare providers that improve patient experience.

Google Cloud Results:

• Enhances communications capabilities for healthcare providers
• Migrates entire on-prem IT stack to Google Cloud
• Improves speed to market for new patient communications features
• Maintains efficient IT spend practices and reduces management burden

About 4PatientCare

4PatientCare has provided specialized patient engagement and communications solutions for the eye care industry for 20 years and supports doctors’ offices to optimize patient interactions.
Industry: Healthcare
Location: United States

Healthcare providers continue to adopt digital solutions to streamline and enhance delivering patient care—bringing providers and patients together no matter where they are. 4PatientCare helps facilitate digital communications between patients and doctors, health plans, and clinics, working across all channels, whether people want to interact via text, voice, email, online, or other avenues.

“Our greatest value is freeing up healthcare providers to stay focused on patients who come into an office by managing communications with patients at home who might have billing, scheduling, and other needs,” says George Mustafa, Managing Director at 4PatientCare. “We rely heavily upon automation to do this at the scale we need.”

With business and patient demands on healthcare providers increasing, 4PatientCare wanted to further strengthen its IT environment to offer broader, even more exceptional services across the country. That meant migrating its on-prem servers and databases into the cloud while modernizing client-facing apps and any remaining internal systems.

Having run all its IT on-prem for 20 years, 4PatientCare knew it needed support to handle the migration. It chose to work with Google Cloud and MediaAgility, which was acquired by Persistent Systems in May 2022 to form its Google-focused business unit (GBU).

Keeping costs in check during an extensive IT migration

After evaluating cloud providers, 4PatientCare saw Google Cloud as the clear choice given its lower costs and outstanding security. After deciding to standardize Google Cloud, 4PatientCare brought Persistent’s GBU on board as a trusted partner to manage the migration and optimize the move to the cloud.

MediaAgility gave us a lot of confidence right from the outset of the project, as they took a very educational and dynamic approach to our migration needs.

George Mustafa, Managing Director, 4PatientCare

To start with, we conducted a full-scale analysis of 4PatientCare’s needs, mapping the company’s IT landscape and connecting components to specific Google Cloud services. This part of the engagement also included planning to ensure that HIPAA compliance was maintained every step of the way.

We then assisted with migrating on-prem servers to Google Compute Engine, converting apps to run on Google Kubernetes Engine and Google App Engine, and launching Cloud Functions to manage streaming data needs. We also helped 4PatientCare migrate some of its VMs that were running on other services onto Google Cloud.

“MediaAgility has been indispensable throughout our journey to the cloud,” says George. “They helped us build valuable knowledge about how to get the greatest value from our investment in Google Cloud. Without their help, we would have had to significantly increase our IT staff and try to achieve our goals through trial and error.”

At the same time, 4PatientCare kept costs down compared to if they went with other cloud vendors, enabling the company to drive a higher return on investment right from the start.

Scale and security for optimal healthcare experiences

Two of the key goals of 4PatientCare’s cloud modernization strategy were to improve system availability to clients and patients while maintaining strict security controls. As 4PatientCare manages sensitive healthcare data, HIPAA compliance is always top of mind.

4PatientCare’s proprietary applications essentially ingest, process, and analyze data to give healthcare offices insights into which patients need to be communicated with and for what purpose. To ensure these results are delivered accurately and in real-time on a larger scale, the cloud became a necessity.

“The excellent security offered by Google Cloud makes a big difference for us,” says George. “We have to keep HIPAA at the forefront of any services we offer. Google Cloud takes a security-by-design approach to innovation, rather than viewing it as an afterthought.”

We not only focused on infrastructure management, but also helped to create a holistic modernization path for 4PatientCare to move from VM-based workloads to K8S and Cloud Functions.

“We worked closely with 4PatientCare to ensure we had all of the necessary security and management requirements in mind as we guided them through their digital transformation,” says Kamal Puri, Partner at Persistent Google Business Unit. “Working with 4PatientCare was a great experience, and we’re happy to continue supporting them in their IT endeavors moving forward.”

At the same time, 4PatientCare found tremendous value in converting applications to Kubernetes to improve system availability and scale up to meet the demands of more customers. GKE and Cloud SQL quickly provided the power necessary to accomplish its goals.

“GKE and Cloud SQL have stood out for us as opportunities to increase the elasticity of our applications and systems, while Google Cloud security components keep our data safe,” says George. “For a company of our size and in our industry, those are massive competitive differentiators.”

Growing comfort working in the cloud

4PatientCare has enjoyed internal benefits from its migration to Google Cloud. It has also benefited from continued collaboration with MediaAgility including the ability to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. The company also no longer worries about server provisioning and other previously time-consuming tasks associated with on-prem IT.

But perhaps most important, 4PatientCare customers have embraced the company’s migration to the cloud. “With our IT now running in Google Cloud, we are better prepared and positioned to allow doctors’ offices to focus on their patients and provide exceptional experiences whether patients are in clinics or at home,” says George.

Today, 4PatientCare uses freed-up time to focus on leveraging data to make sure patient messages are delivered to the right people at the right time. This includes developing features that make better use of incoming data.

“We see a lot of opportunities with Google Cloud Machine Learning solutions and other data analytics services moving forward,” says George. “We are excited as a business to continue to work with Google Cloud and MediaAgility to move toward predictive analytics that will benefit our clients and their patients.”

Products

• Google Cloud
• Cloud Functions
• Google Compute Engine
• Cloud SQL
• Google App Engine
• Google Kubernetes Engine

MediaAgility was acquired by Persistent in May 2022. The company recently setup a dedicated Google Business Unit that leverages MediaAgility’s capabilities in order to enhance its competency and capability as a Google Cloud Premier Partner and its capabilities form the foundation for Persistent’s Google Business Unit. As a Google Cloud Premier Partner and a strategic IT Transformation services provider, the Google Business Unit is focused on delivering transformational services with cloud-native solutions that enable businesses to stay relevant and benefit from the public cloud platform capabilities. 

Persistent’s end-to-end managed services partnership with 4PatientCare 

The client has outsourced the day-to-day management of cloud-based services and technical support to Persistent, a trusted MSP specialized Google Partner. 

The client has had zero outages in more than a year.

Technical support

• We provide 24X5 Tier 2 technical support for the Google Cloud Platform services 
• Tech Stack supported: Compute, Data archival, Identity and Security, Marketplace, and Networking
• We have achieved 98-99% SLA

Our managed technical support includes

• Help desk with SLA
• Monitoring 
• Automation 
• Infrastructure management
• Cloud optimization
• Reports and billings
• Identity and access management

Technical Account Manager

• Persistent has assigned a Technical Account Manager (TAM) to provide technical, and operational consulting and advice on Google Cloud Platform best practices.
• TAM receives critical alert notifications in addition to the designated Customer IT staff. 
• Our Technical Account Manager acts as a Single Point of Contact for the Customer.  Outside of business hours, the client can report any issue through a direct phone call.

About Persistent

Persistent is a Google Cloud Partner that helps companies improve customer experiences and internal IT operations through consulting services focused on data-driven transformation and modernization.