Smile Digital Health Works with MedX and Race Data to Enhance Healthcare Application, Identifying Skin Cancer Faster

AWS Partner Smile Digital Health and technology provider Race Data collaborated to design and deploy an enhanced version of the MedX DermSecure teledermatology platform on AWS. The updated solution helps dermatologists identify skin cancer accurately in days instead of weeks or months and meets international regulatory standards for data privacy. The solution was created, deployed, and marketable in half the time it would have taken using an on-premises environment. The DermSecure platform runs on Amazon EC2 and uses Amazon S3 to store clinical data.

MedX Health Corp., headquartered in Ontario, Canada, is a leading medical device and software company focused on skin health. The company provides teledermatology solutions, enabling patients and dermatologists to interact rapidly and asynchronously. This is especially helpful in Canada, where it can often take up to 18 months to secure an appointment with a dermatologist. MedX offers the DermSecure telemedicine platform. The platform collects and stores data from the MedX SIAscope, a medical device that takes precise five images 2mm below the skin’s surface to create real-time images for dermatologists to evaluate moles or lesions within minutes.

As it prepared to expand DermSecure globally, MedX needed to implement a data repository that would securely host patient data captured by the SIAscope. To scale and integrate with international healthcare ecosystems, MedX needed a Health Level Seven (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) compliant application environment, that was also capable of supporting HIPAA, PIPEDA, and other medical information privacy regulations. Additionally, to deploy DermSecure faster, MedX needed to upgrade its backend software from a PC-based system to a browser-based platform that could store and share data and images easily and securely.

To manage secure data capture, MedX engaged Smile Digital Health, a provider of health data and integration solutions and an AWS Partner. Smile Digital Health offers a purpose-built clinical data repository designed around the HL7 FHIR standard, allowing DermSecure to integrate with electronic medical record (EMR) solutions and patient ecosystems globally.

MedX also chose to work with Race Data, a data-driven technology company that offers data management and intelligence expertise. “We came in to help manage and make sure DermSecure is highly available 24/7 across the globe,” says San Kethes, chief executive officer at Race Data. “Our developers and technical leads were brought in to ensure all the technology vendors adhered to the right processes.”

MedX, in collaboration with Smile Digital Health and Race Data, created and deployed an updated, more accessible SIAscope on DermSecure. The new platform serves tens of thousands of patients in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Italy. The platform runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing clinical data. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services, makes it easy for MedX to operate and scale databases on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The updated DermSecure platform allows dermatologists to work on any browser to run the application and use SIAscopy along with an HD camera to help identify skin cancer and other common skin disorders.

Together, Smile Digital Health and Race Data designed and implemented the new platform in one year. “Everything is configured the same way on AWS, which made development and deployment simple,” says Tony D’Apice, system integration at Race Data. “It would have taken easily double the amount of time to create and deploy a solution in a traditional on-premises environment.”

The transformation of the PC-based product to a browser-based, multilingual interface also made it practical to deploy DermSecure globally, on any hardware. Taking advantage of the scalability of AWS, MedX and the technology partners can also easily roll out the platform to new global regions. “Once we got one environment set up, it was very easy to simply recreate it using a template,” D’Apice says. “In terms of jurisdiction, it’s easy to get it up and running anywhere, whether it’s the US or Europe, and to adapt to local regulatory data residency requirements because of Smile Digital Health. Additionally, it was easy to set up multi-language capabilities to meet global language requirements.”

Because of the enhanced interoperability of the DermSecure platform, dermatologists can make accurate assessments and detect potentially deadly skin cancer in two days instead of weeks or months. “Instead of waiting months just to get a dermatologist appointment, patients can be scanned even in remote locations on DermSecure and access results very quickly,” Kethes says. “If a lesion is caught before it becomes cancer, that’s potentially saving someone’s life and giving them peace of mind.”

Smile Digital Health’s HL7 FHIR-compliant environment ensures DermSecure customers are able to meet HIPAA, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other privacy regulations. DermSecure customers now have patient information residing in their specific jurisdiction or country. “If this environment wasn’t on AWS, we would have to install hardware in different countries and manage data centers in each location,” D’Apice says. “AWS already has a presence in all the countries we’re expanding to.”

MedX continues to work with Smile Digital Health and Race Data to enhance the DermSecure platform. Kethes concludes, “MedX wants to be able to use dermatology images and data for clinical research in the future. We’ve structured the solution for that purpose because of the flexibility and scalability of AWS.”