Luma Health: A Patient Engagement Platform with the Power to Take on the Pandemic

Guest Post by Aditya Bansod, Co-founder & CTO, Luma Health

Vaccinating millions of Americans against COVID-19 is a tremendous task, and healthcare providers have gone from scheduling a handful of appointments to thousands each day.

Luma Health is handling the vaccine operations for leading health systems across the United States, both large and small. Our patient engagement platform makes it simple and seamless for people to schedule their COVID-19 shots at mass vaccination sites, federally qualified health centers, community-based clinics, and even their local doctor’s office.

Aditya Bansod, Co-founder & CTO

We believe if there were ever an example of SaaS technology having the power to facilitate the saving of lives at scale, this is it. It’s a generational opportunity for software to deliver on the promise of digital health—and the Luma Health platform is up to the challenge.

A platform with efficient delivery and infinite scale

Technology plays a critical role in ensuring that the vaccine rollout goes smoothly. Patient engagement efforts generally try to create demand and offer a good enough experience to capture what trickles in. Vaccination has flipped this formula on its head. Now engagement efforts and the platforms that support them must handle unseen levels of demand and coordinate the educational and scheduling experience in the most simple way possible. That’s why we use AWS to create a robust, highly scalable engagement platform that improves access and efficiency for healthcare organizations—and that patients love. Not only does our platform deliver exceptional performance, but it can also be integrated into almost any clinical workflow.

Built atop AWS, Luma Health is built using a microservices architecture that sits on top of Amazon EKS as its backbone. Originally, we were built using a specialized HIPAA compliant, GitOps/Dockerized platform, but as we started to scale up and needed more flexibility with a growing variety of workloads, we migrated to EKS to allow us the ability to scale and the flexibility to integrate with the broader AWS ecosystem. With thousands of pods running on a variety of NodeGroups within Amazon EC2 managed by EKS, we’ve been able to leverage AWS to scale up to meet the needs of our customers during the vaccine rollout.

In addition to hosting our core applications on EKS + EC2, we also distribute our customer and patient-facing applications on Amazon CloudFront, and we run customer-specific code using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateways, allowing us to build to the unique and diverse needs of healthcare customers without the need for additional server infrastructure. This allows us infinite scale as we deploy to more healthcare providers and facilitate a growing number of vaccination programs.

The only healthcare solution equal to the top-tier SaaS providers

The truth is that healthcare providers need help with their vaccine rollout. They need a platform that can help them educate patient populations on the efficacy of the vaccine, schedule appointments as supplies are made available, communicate with patients, send reminders and updates, and allow patients to easily reschedule appointments if needed.

Every health system is unique. We have large customers running mass vaccination sites at state fairgrounds, and we have small local providers administering one vaccination at a time in a doctor’s office. One deployment may need patient-intake capabilities and consent forms, while another deployment may require multilingual messaging, patient-education, and drive-through healthcare capabilities.

Healthcare CIOs need robust battle-tested solutions that are a fit for whatever vaccination workflows they’re using. They’re looking for best-in-class  SaaS providers, both across the enterprise and for their vaccination workflows . For instance, enterprise customers are entrusting their business to a select few SaaS providers, such as PagerDuty for incident response, CrowdStrike for endpoint security and threat detection, and ServiceNow for managing digital workflows.

Luma Health is prepared for the challenges enterprise customers face. In fact, we are the most validated patient engagement platform as measured by KLAS Research, providing seamless connections to a host of electronic health record (EHR) systems, including Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, eClinicalWorks, Meditech, and more. We’ve built a breadth of capabilities across all aspects of the patient engagement lifecycle with the depth of a modern, cloud-native architecture to scale to the needs of every unique healthcare journey.

500,000 transactions per second, half a million patients at a time

Luma Health technology is making a difference at vaccination sites across the country, from Cook County Health’s 17 mass vaccination sites in Illinois to Montefiore Health System’s efforts in New York City.

Cook County Health operates one of the United States’ largest COVID-19 vaccination programs.  But when Cook County Health first opened its 17 mass vaccination sites, the scheduling and messaging solution it used couldn’t scale to meet the volume. That’s when they turned to Luma Health, expanding our existing relationship to include vaccine operations.

Our platform is now handling up to 500,000 transactions per second and is accommodating up to half a million people on the portal at any moment. The Luma Health platform also integrates with the county’s Cerner EHR. There was even a period when Luma Health and Cook County Health were the largest consumers of Cerner APIs in the world.

At Montefiore Health System in New York City, more than 150,000 eligible patients have self-scheduled a vaccination using Luma Health’s user-friendly experience. Non-eligible patients are placed on Luma Health’s Smart Waitlist, so they get appointment offers once they become eligible. Our platform also integrates into Montefiore’s Epic EHR and currently facilitates 150,000 vaccination-related engagements and growing.

An easy, personalized experience for all patients

Consumers are demanding easier and more personalized healthcare, whether that means more convenient appointment scheduling, real-time health updates, or streamlined processes for administering healthcare. Going forward, consumers will be less inclined to tolerate inconveniences like long wait times and lack of transparency. Even after everyone is vaccinated, patient expectations will remain sky-high. It will be increasingly incumbent on health providers to use technology to deliver next-generation services and create an easier, better, and more personalized experience for all patients.

Visit Luma Health to see how we can help.