Neuroventis modernizes its mobile app (Helpilepsy) cloud infrastructure and gains competitive edge

• Cloud
• Architecture
• AWS
• ECS
• Compliance
• ISO 133485

Founded in 2017, Neuroventis’ mission is to accelerate the advent of personalized healthcare and empower individuals through digital technologies.

With a focus on neurological disorders, Neuroventis developed and distributed the platform of the same name, used and loved by hundreds of people with epilepsy and migraine and their medical specialists.

Helpilepsy is the digital health assistant dedicated to patients diagnosed with epilepsy and their neurologists. This mobile app tracks seizure, medication, side effects and other parameters, and monitors patients’ inputs through beautifully visualized web dashboards. This clever way of managing the disease brings more autonomy and a better quality of life to the patient.

Currently patients and doctors use Helpilepsy in five countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany and Hungary) with greater expansion on the horizon.

Key challenges

Catalyst and prerequisite to further growth was the compliance to the ISO 13485 certification, the medical device industry’s most widely used international standard for quality management. Neuroventis, like other medical software companies, had to secure this certification and called in Positive Thinking Company to help them do so.

Prior to our intervention, Neuroventis’ engineers had set up the Helpilepsy app in the Cloud. However, with no internal technical cloud skills and knowledge, the resulting infrastructure was slow and inefficient.

Our approach

The Positive Thinking Company’s Cloud experts jumped in to redesign the current Cloud infrastructure from scratch, make it secure and ultimately lead Neuroventis towards the obtention of ISO 13485 certification. To meet these goals our teams:

• Migrated the back end from a EC2 machine to AWS Fargate.
• Separated entirely the development, staging and production environments. Medical information, hence very sensitive and confidential, was stopped from flowing from the production environments to the others for security purposes.
• Implemented autoscaling on AWS Fargate (from one up to three containers available) so that Helpilepsy could automatically adjust its capacity needs while maintaining its performance and steadiness.
• Set up a bastion host (or “jump”) host, segregating their private network and external traffic, hence providing a single secure point of entry to the infrastructure for Neuroventis’ developers.
• Implemented Continuous Integration on their GitLab for front end and  back ends, allowing them to carry out automatic deployments.
• Analyzed their AWS environment, searched for common misconfigurations and guaranteed a fault tolerant and secure architecture.

Benefits

The completion of this project resulted in a number of benefits, starting with the technical ones:

• We designed a more appropriate architecture that better fits the needs and reduced the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by 95%.
• We implemented agile methods and DevOps practices for faster and automated deployments.
• The segregation of the environments and the implementation of a bastion made the infrastructure more secure.
• We protected the architecture against most DDoS attacks thanks to integrated services.
• We improved the existing caching solution to reduce response times, therefore improving overall responsiveness and performance.
• Autoscaling allowed for a better elasticity of the infrastructure and improved cost management.
• We securely delivered Helpilepsy’s data with low latency and high transfer speeds.
• By training Neuroventis’ engineers on Cloud concepts, we helped them in the stack appropriation process so they could handle the new infrastructure autonomously.

On the business side, we successfully:

• Leveraged managed services to reduce SysOps needs and Neuroventis’ overall operational costs.
• Leveraged AWS in order to reduce the number of operations and free up more time for R&D.

With Positive Thinking Company’s help, the Helpilepsy app was made fully compliant to the ISO 13485 standard. This allowed Neuroventis to:

• Refocus on their core business
• Gain further credibility
• Acquire a strong selling point that they can offer to potential patients, doctors and business partners
• Boosted their ability to venture in more European markets.

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Author

Marc P.