Exploiting opportunities for growth with the cloud

Swisscom Health is digitalising the processes for healthcare facilities and networking them with the expanding eHealth world. A comprehensive portfolio of solutions and services is available for doctors, hospitals, healthcare institutions and laboratories. One of these is the receivables management solution curaBILL for streamlined practice administration. bbv has been developing this solution with Swisscom Health since 2002.

Swisscom Health uses modern solutions from the cloud that enable people to work independently of time and place. bbv planned and implemented migration of the curaBILL application landscape, which also served as a pilot for other Swisscom Health products.

Implementing and developing a flexible cloud infrastructure

A number of technologies and security standards were brought up to date during the course of the migration. The lift and shift migration approach was therefore not an option. In addition, a cloud blueprint was provided that had been developed by Swisscom’s Azure solution architects.

The bbv experts elaborated the requirements with all stakeholders, especially with respect to security and interfaces. A flexible cloud infrastructure was then developed – using IaC (Infrastructure as Code) wherever possible. The test, stage and production environments were geared to the high security requirements of Swisscom Health for health data.

Where necessary, the bbv team adapted individual parts of the curaBILL solution in order to connect central Azure services to the existing solution, such as the Azure KeyVault for secrets and certification management. Various SQL and NoSQL databases were developed in the cloud and large quantities of sensitive data were migrated beforehand, so that only a differential alignment was necessary for the actual migration. In addition, all web applications, REST APIs and messaging endpoints as well as the web application firewall and other resources and services were readied for migration.

“bbv supported us with great commitment on the path towards a modern infrastructure, with the result that our solution is now ideally prepared for the future of the eHealth world. A major success!”

David Pravato, Product Manager curaBILL, Swisscom Health

The actual big bang migration took place finally. Thanks to meticulous preparation, everything went off without a hitch – exactly on schedule to the minute.

As a modern infrastructure, the cloud reduces security and outage risks and prepares the product for future developments. With Microsoft Azure, the groundwork has been laid for further modernising curaBILL, while complying with the high standards with respect to quality and security. The developer team now has much more flexibility and autonomy for working on curaBILL. All DevOps disciplines can be executed directly by the team. Fewer dependencies mean more efficient working, which in turn means that new functions can be implemented faster and rolled out into business more rapidly.

Project insights:

• Future-ready: Thanks to cloud migration and modernised technologies, curaBILL is optimally readied for the growing networking of the eHealth world.
• Time-to-market: New functions are ready for market much faster.
• State-of-the-art security: Multi-layered security services and intelligent monitoring and compliance tools protect patient and customer data.
• Expertise: The bbv team was responsible for the entire migration – this eased the burden for Swisscom Health, since they were able to trust the highly conscientious and experienced team.