Unicorne and MUUTAA™ Leverage AWS to Boost Performance for Healthcare Supply Chains

MUUTAA™, a company that provides AI solutions for healthcare supply chain management, partnered with Unicorne to develop a secure, well performing and scalable architecture for its DemandAMP+™ solution on AWS. Unicorne’s AWS certified experts created a fully automated code infrastructure that helped endcustomers forecast better, gain agility and reduce carrying costs.

Founded in 2019 and based in Quebec City, MUUTAA™ develops leading AI solutions for hospital and healthcare supply chain management leaders across North America. MUUTAA™ customers manage billions of dollars annually in supplies, medications, and products from tens of thousands of vendors. Responding quickly and nimbly to fluctuations in healthcare demand reduces inventory costs and, eliminates waste. To help customers become more agile and lower costs, MUUTAA™ solutions integrate key data sources, AI, machine learning, and simulation to improve supply chain efficiency with better forecasting and demand sensing. Specifically, they pair medication and medical supply attributes with patient attributes to determine true patient-driven demand.

For every supply, medication, and product in the supply chain, thousands of data points need to be sourced from existing inventory, warehouse and order systems, then analyzed to make optimal sourcing and purchasing decisions that align with patient-demand forecasts. MUUTAA™ automates this process by providing supply chain decision support through cognitive assistants.

Supply chain managers need improved demand-based forecasting capabilities, but most forecasting solutions rely on partial information. For MUUTAA™ to deliver next-generation predictive analytics, its solution needed to include data from additional sources, such as clinical procedures, physician schedules and protocol changes. Robust data integration would help supply chain leaders make more informed decisions, support better care and, ultimately, improve health outcomes.

To address the issue, MUUTAA™ developed DemandAMP+™, an AI solution that applies machine learning across a variety of data sources to bring more precision to supply chain decisions. DemandAMP+™ predicts supply needs, identifies outliers, and provides forecasts based on historical data combined with current protocols and consumption. Healthcare supply chain teams are using DemandAMP+™ to predict patient-driven demand and make better, more cost-effective and outcomes-driven order management decisions by leveraging data that resides in various information systems.

MUUTAA™ wanted an AWS certified cloud technology partner to help support the security, AI, performance, and scalability needs of DemandAMP+™. They sought the assistance of Unicorne, an AWS Partner and cloud technologies company based in Quebec City, Canada, that designs cloud applications and supports companies in the migration, optimization, and development of cloud-native applications.

Having worked with Unicorne’s cofounders on past endeavors, MUUTAA™ developers were familiar with Unicorne’s expertise, skillsets and capabilities. As a result, MUUTAA™ leaders engaged Unicorne as its technology partner.

Unicorne’s AWS certified experts conducted an analysis to gain a full understanding of the project’s needs and objectives. Following the analysis phase, Unicorne’s AWS Solution Architect designed a fully automated infrastructure as code (IaC) that addressed the needs of MUUTAA™ customers.

First, Unicorne used AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to create the IaC and all pipelines for the automated deployment of DemandAMP+™. The team then created multiple environments for development, staging and production. The ability to deploy infrastructure automatically and on demand makes it easy to add new clients and environments to the system. The new architecture automatically adjusts when MUUTAA adds new clients, and automatically creates all resources needed to host an additional AI model, including data storage, compute power, and database.

To further meet performance and scalability needs, the infrastructure automatically adapts its load to customer demand. This functionality is supported by AWS Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Aurora, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and AWS Lambda.

Unicorne developed a secure vault API (and front-end app) that MUUTAA™ supply chain clients can use to upload files to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda. These files are used in DemandAMP+™ AI models in forecasting and data analysis.

To ensure maximum security, monitoring tools were put in place, including Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection and Tugboat Logic for assurance and compliance. These systems generate automatic alerts when flaws, intrusions, or vulnerabilities are discovered in the infrastructure, which allows teams to respond quickly. All data and communications are encrypted (at-rest and in-transit), and an AWS Account was created to manage shared compliance data to consolidate the security of all accounts in the AWS organization.

Lastly, Unicorne created the infrastructure needed to host DemandAMP+™ AI models, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), and a web application with AWS Fargate, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon Cognito, Amazo Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. Unicorne hosted the web application for ML Management on Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront.

The development process took place over several months, and MUUTAA™ leaders say they were impressed by Unicorne’s ability to move the project forward. The system launched successfully in Fall 2021.

With better, smarter, and more secure demand forecasting, DemandAMP+™ has helped healthcare supply chain leaders plan ahead with more accuracy. To reduce storage, logistic and material handling costs, hospitals and health systems need to have the right supply quantities available at the right times in the right places. With DemandAMP+™ on AWS, most MUUTAA™ customers have reduced carrying costs, stockout costs and substitute costs by 50 percent.

With better and more precise data on consumption patterns from DemandAMP+™ on AWS, healthcare organizations can carry less excess inventory, save on warehousing, reach better decisions faster, negotiate lower-cost substitute items, and react with more agility to fluctuations in demand. The automation of low-value tasks reduces the need for additional employees, and stronger forecasting saves on rush order costs.

Overall, DemandAMP+™ APIs process approximately 8 million requests and analyzes more than 2 million security events every month. Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.