Qalius Helps Queensway Carleton Hospital Migrate SHIIP to AWS, Expanding Access to Health Organizations

QCH is an acute care hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, that serves nearly 500,000 patients every year. The hospital acts as the services provider organization for SHIIP, a web application that facilitates a seamless exchange of patient information among healthcare providers in real time.

SHIIP aims to enhance coordinated care planning for patients and population health management functionality by providing healthcare professionals with a longitudinal view of a patient’s journey through the healthcare system. The application also uses analytic overlays to provide information that can improve clinical decisions and patient outcomes. In an on-premises environment, QCH experienced difficulties expanding SHIIP to support its growing network of healthcare providers. With ambitions to onboard more hospitals and healthcare organizations, QCH and the SHIIP team realized that using a traditional on-premises environment did not provide access to the technical capabilities to expand the application and carry out its road map.

To access modern cloud services, QCH chose to migrate to AWS. The hospital selected Qalius to provide AWS expertise to navigate the migration process with secure architectures and no interruptions to users.

“We recognized Qalius as an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, and its proposal to support our migration was also complemented with a proof of concept to confirm that we could achieve the migration with our stated requirements,” says Tenzin Norsang Lateng, solutions architect for SHIIP. “It was clear from the beginning that Qalius had the experience to support our project and configure our environment so that we had the flexibility to implement our road map. Working with Qalius felt like an extension of our team.”

Qalius specializes in building web applications that address each customer’s unique requirements, with a focus on use cases in healthcare and financial services. “We were founded specifically to be an AWS Partner,” says Rich Finlay, president of Qalius. “We approach migrations with an application point of view; we understand how to configure AWS services to optimize the performance and security of each application component.”

Qalius and the SHIIP team implemented a bespoke solution for authentication that uses AWS Directory Service, a fully managed Microsoft Active Directory service, and Application Load Balancer, which load balances HTTP and HTTPS traffic with advanced request routing. These AWS services integrate with a third-party multifactor authentication service. Using this bespoke identity solution, SHIIP was able to migrate to AWS without impacting the way that clinicians authenticate with the application.

Qalius also implemented Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Migrating to Amazon RDS provided a scalable database solution that could be adjusted to meet the evolving needs of the application without the overhead of traditional database administration. SHIIP’s Amazon RDS databases receive clinical data from 28 healthcare providers in eastern Ontario. To help securely transfer this data, Qalius implemented services such as AWS Transit Gateway, which connects Amazon Virtual Private Clouds and on-premises networks through a central hub.

In all aspects of the project, Qalius selected architectures that align with the security pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which describes AWS best practices for protecting systems and data in the cloud. This helped the migration align with the requirements of the Personal Health Information Protection Act. Qalius and QCH adopted AWS Security Hub, which automates AWS security checks and centralizes security alerts, to facilitate the continuous governance of the AWS services configuration. By automating compliance checks against industry standards and best practices, QCH can validate that SHIIP meets privacy and security requirements under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.

As soon as QCH migrated SHIIP to AWS with Qalius, QCH saw a 30 percent improvement in system response times for end users. The hospital also unlocked 20 percent savings in system support costs and can expand and scale the application as demand increases. With a cloud-based architecture on AWS, the SHIIP team can scale to accommodate additional users and data contributors and adjust capacity and analytics capabilities accordingly. Since the migration, the Qalius team has worked with QCH to further optimize SHIIP’s environment in the cloud. All these benefits have empowered the SHIIP team to realize its road map.

The SHIIP team can deploy new application features in 95 percent less time than it could on premises by using AWS services such as AWS CodePipeline, which automates continuous delivery pipelines for fast and reliable updates. The rapid releases help SHIIP to adapt to meet the evolving needs of healthcare providers and patients, all while reducing the time to deliver updates to its application.

Services such as AWS Security Hub continuously monitor the application and check that it adheres to hundreds of AWS and industry best practices for data security. Warnings and alerts are automatically routed to Qalius and the SHIIP team for assessment. “The migration to AWS empowered SHIIP to stand on its own without depending on our hospital’s infrastructure,” says Eric Morrison, chief technology officer at QCH. “The collaboration between Qalius and the SHIIP team helped us get there.”

After the migration, Qalius and QCH deployed Amazon QuickSight, which powers data-driven organizations with unified business intelligence at scale. Amazon QuickSight is rendering analytics from real-time data from the SHIIP application with row-level security. “Using Amazon QuickSight will give us the capability to expand our reporting abilities all while using cloud-based technologies that can grow and support our health service providers’ reporting needs,” says Lateng.