German Health Provider Unites IT Across 26 Locations and Digitizes, Streamlines Processes with AWS and Gesundheitsforen Leipzig GmbH

Hera Residenzen Pflege GmbH, a rapidly growing company providing outpatient and home care, digitized most of its nursing staff's administrative work and improved process efficiency by consolidating its multi-location IT infrastructure onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). Assisted by AWS Partner Gesundheitsforen Leipzig GmbH, Hera Residenzen now runs a significant part of its administrative processes on a highly scalable central cloud infrastructure on AWS, allowing its care staff to concentrate on nursing and spend minimal time on administration.

The care industry is a rapidly growing sector of the economy in Germany due to an ageing population. Outpatient and home care service providers are emerging in virtually every major town and are creating an increasing number of jobs. However, each of these companies has to maintain its own systems for patient administration, billing, quality management, finance, and human resources. These functions represent cost inefficiencies for care providers that often lead to mergers and acquisitions. This results in the creation of larger organizations that operate local care service operations at several locations with centralized administration systems.

Hera Residenzen Pflege GmbH was founded in Leipzig against this backdrop and in anticipation of increasing market consolidation. After acquiring 26 local care service providers, it is today one of the fastest growing outpatient and home care service providers in Germany. The company currently employs 950 people and is planning further growth.

To support further growth, Hera Residenzen needed a solid and scalable IT foundation to host its central administration and enable the fast and smooth onboarding process of newly acquired care service providers into the group's central infrastructure. In addition, its care staff needed access to all the up-to-date patient information and applications they need. The infrastructure also needed to offer sufficient flexibility and agility to support the long-term growth ambitions of a company with widely distributed operations.

Hera Residenzen talked to several IT service providers, one of which was AWS Partner Gesundheitsforen Leipzig GmbH, a well-established, multi-level service provider for the healthcare sector. Gesundheitsforen has been working with AWS since 2017. In addition to solutions like 'Datalytics DRG|PEPP.Grouper', a business intelligence application for health insurance, it recently launched a cloud-native invoice auditing application for hospitals and outpatient care service providers that runs on AWS.

Gesundheitsforen considered several different configurations of the solution, both on premises as well as based in the cloud. "The intention was to bundle all administrative and organizational systems into the holding company's central infrastructure so that the local care service staff can concentrate on their actual work," says Marko Gulde, head of software development at Gesundheitsforen.

In addition to replacing the local file servers that were running day-to-day office business services in the branch offices, the company wanted to create a centralized instance for the Medifox care documentation software that would manage the data of all care customers of the group. "The idea was to centralize the services in a way that no more than desktop computers and printers would be necessary at the local branch offices," says Gulde.

The IT architects at Gesundheitsforen and the management of Hera Residenzen quickly realized that the requirements for flexible scaling, simple onboarding of new partners, and location-independent availability of essential applications could best be met using a cloud-based infrastructure. “With its operations spread across Germany, Hera Residenzen is an ideal use case for a cloud-first strategy,” says Axel Schmidt, managing director at Gesundheitsforen.

The cloud approach was also preferred by the management of Hera Residenzen, especially as the company also wanted to migrate other important applications to the central infrastructure in the future. “Long-term aspects and flexibility were the key criteria,” says Gulde. “In addition, the cloud-based services could be configured to be more cost-efficient and flexible in terms of contractual commitment than an on-premises infrastructure.”

The project began with the implementation of infrastructure on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and customizable computing capacity for virtually any workload. It also used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that allows any amount of data to be accessed from anywhere, and used Amazon RDS for SQL Server as the platform for the Medifox database. Amazon WorkSpaces was chosen for setting up a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to run complete virtual Windows desktops—the VDI allows Hera employees to work on applications entirely in the cloud.

After successfully pilot-testing the new environment with one local care service provider, Gesundheitsforen integrated all other local providers into the central infrastructure. According to Gulde, once the customer data of the acquired provider has been prepared for import, the onboarding process of newly acquired companies now only takes a few hours.

All Hera Residenzen’s locations are now running on AWS. “We have now transferred the data of all 26 care services to the cloud,” says Silvio Bartmuss, head of IT at Hera Residenzen. “This is particularly important for the care documentation to comply with legally required retention terms but also to reduce local data storage while the central administration has immediate access to all the data it needs.”

In addition to Medifox, the billing software also runs on AWS. “The huge advantage is that centralized data storage enables better reporting, controlling, and quality management—far beyond the capabilities of Medifox itself," says Andreas Mildner, managing partner at Hera Residenzen. "These three disciplines provide management with all relevant parameters for taking decisions, and they are all the more important as the company continues to grow."

Hera Residenzen is now considering expanding its IT environment on AWS. "The controlling software would be a good candidate in this regard," says Bartmuss. "We operate a Datev cloud instance with a third-party provider for our accounting. By using its interface to the controlling software's data warehouse, we can import the data we need for our reporting into AWS."

Other processes could also be migrated to AWS. "It would also be conceivable to move our quality management installation to AWS so that all data and applications can be made available from the same instance," says Mildner. "This software is used to control the quality of all of the company's field processes, from the nursing and care processes to the training courses we choose for our staff."

Thanks to the central infrastructure and easy mobile access to Medifox data, the administrative work of the nursing staff has been largely digitized. "Previously, the nursing staff had to go to the office before their house calls and collect the customer files for the day," says Mildner. "Today, they can access all the necessary information via smartphone or tablet. The only thing that has to be done on paper is the signature on the receipt for the services provided at the end of each month—and only because the law requires it this way."