Modernizing Mental Health Care through the Cloud

Due to its robust suite of services that enhance scalability, security, and compliance with HIPAA regulations, Encora chose AWS as the platform of choice. As a result, Encora ensured high availability, isolation of development and production environments, encryption for data at rest and in transit, scalability through load balancers and spot instances, and efficient monitoring with CloudWatch. All of these aligned with the client's need for a secure and resilient remote care delivery platform.  The client's product enhancement spanned a range of services including: 

• Product Management: Designed new functionalities and treatment options to increase patient engagement. Implemented product usage analysis to validate launched features and generate new hypotheses for future improvements
  
  
• Cloud Optimization: Applied the best practices in AWS aiming at better performance, stability, and security. Documented every presented solution with clear trade-offs
  
  
• Product Development: Improved the existing product, released web and mobile apps; developed new features to address the fast-paced needs of a startup
  
  
• Platform Modernization: Modernized patient and internal portals, implemented new treatment programs, and supported feature toggle and A/B Testing
  
  

• Data Pipeline Engineering - Created data pipelines and architected a data warehouse to support the analysis of product data. Developed version-controlled dashboards and reports for monitoring KPIs for different stakeholders. Implemented data governance practices 

   

• UX Design - Worked with the product team to deliver the best patient experience. Participated in brainstorming, spec, and tech designs. 

   

• Application & Product Maintenance​ - Supported client’s infrastructure by improving security, test coverage, third-party tools integration, and CI/CD processes. Made the product compliant with HIPAA regulations

  
  

• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) - Improved the CI/CD process. Utilized IaC and monitoring tools. Created ephemeral environments to simulate the real application server capacity with a Kubernetes cluster

   

• Test Strategy & Planning - Performed a wide variety of tests: unit, regression, integration, visual, and performance. Some were automated to run every day, covering most features. 

The utilization of AWS-managed services significantly decreased the IT team’s workload associated with server management. It also helped the client consolidate and reduce infrastructure​ costs. With AWS, the client’s solution could achieve scalability, resilience, and cost effectiveness. Leveraging AWS also enhanced the client’s remote care delivery platform and provided multiple benefits: 

• EKS Cluster with ephemeral containers improved testing, and enabled faster deployments, scalability, and cost savings, allowing developers to work in an environment that closely mirrored the capacity of the production environment

• High automated test coverage increased confidence during deployments and reduced the deployment time from 2 weeks to 4 hours

• User traffic shifted primarily to the mobile app, which handled nearly 70% of user interactions

• Increased weekly repurchase rate by over 20% within three months of implementing new features

• Ad-hoc reports and dashboards provided insights on product usage and enabled data-driven decisions on developing new features