Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!
The first of its kind in South Africa, CareConnect HIE (Health Information Exchange) is a not-for-profit organization formed to facilitate the authorized exchange of information between hospitals, clinics and medical aids to ensure that patients receive the best possible care. The organization was founded by six organizations, including Discovery Health, Momentum Health, Mediclinic, Life Healthcare, Medscheme, and Netcare.
“A key learning that we have taken from the pandemic is that there is greater awareness and need for a HIE to enable the sharing and exchange of information. Covid-19 will be with us for a long time and I’m confident that the development of more clinically focused use cases will be high on the agenda for CareConnect HIE and its Founding Members.”
Dr Rolan Christian, Chief Executive Officer at CareConnect HIE.
As a startup representing numerous hospitals and medical aid administrators, CareConnect HIE needed a highly secure and HIPAA-compliant platform to host its Health Information Exchange data, where authorized health professionals could securely share relevant patient health information between hospitals, and medical aids.
“It acts as a hub for both the public and the private sectors. The CareConnect HIE will be a critical enabler for our health system, one that fosters innovation and integration with all the necessary governance structures in place to ensure fairness. This HIE has been built with the gold standard of governance and security to protect clinical data –the most sensitive of information.”
Dr Rolan Christian, Chief Executive Officer at CareConnect HIE.
Thus, CareConnect HIE decided to bring in an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner (Silicon Overdrive) to assist with the build of their data platform in a secure and compliant AWS environment.
Silicon Overdrive architected a secure, highly available, and cost-optimized solution to integrate CareConnect HIE’s and protect the six Founding Members’ health information data.
We implemented an AWS Landing Zone best-practice, secure and compliant AWS account structure, segregating network, development, staging and production AWS accounts. Each environment has its own supporting infrastructure for the HIE.
By making use of a Transit Gateway, Founding Members are able to connect to a central hub, simplifying network integration and allowing for effortless collaboration and information exchange.
We leveraged Fortinet FortiGate through the AWS Marketplace for secure management access to different environments. FortiGate provides its users with protection from an array of threats, including application control, web filtering, and other advanced security features including extreme threat database and vulnerability management.
Some key AWS services utilized in these environments include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure, resizable compute capacity for hosting applications, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for content and data storage, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute incoming traffic.
Security and compliance services utilized include AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Trusted Advisor, Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity (scans for risk remediation, compliance) and Workload Security.
For secure AWS management console and programmatic access, SSO (Single Sign-One) has been set up to manage access across various AWS accounts on a least-privilege access.
For compliance, we integrated AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) with AWS CloudTrail to provide the AWS team with control of encrypted data and content as well as logs. CloudTrail is also used by account managers to monitor activities within the AWS accounts.
Other security and compliance services utilized were AWS Config, used to assess, audit, and evaluate configurations implemented for AWS resources.
CareConnect’s architecture and recommendations were based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, ISO 27001 and HIPAA security best practices to limit the risk of breaches, and non-compliance regulatory requirements.
CareConnect HIE’s is hosted in a highly secure, ISO 27001, and HIPAA-compliant environment, where patients’ sensitive health information is protected while being shared with hospitals, clinics and medical aids.
Post the build out on AWS, Silicon Overdrive conducted a scan of the environment using Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity, where CareConnect HIE successfully achieved a high HIPAA compliance score. CareConnect also achieved high scores for both ISO and GDPR compliance, which is important to CareConnect’s stakeholders.
The Silicon Overdrive engineering teams were able to deploy the new environment on AWS with a highly available and compliant architecture. Since the environment went live, the HIE has experienced zero downtime.
According to Dr Rolan Christian, Chief Executive Officer at CareConnect HIE, “Silicon Overdrive has proven themselves as a very competent AWS partner that has delivered a high-quality solution for CareConnect. They have guided CareConnect on how to optimize their AWS usage spend and recover costs, as part of our maintenance agreement with Silicon Overdrive. They have also shown great flexibility to support us when dealing with our requirements and budget limitations as a non-profit.”
Silicon Overdrive continues to support and maintain CareConnect HIE’s environment under a Managed Service Agreement, ensuring that the workloads are secure and compliant, that risks are mitigated, and that the HIE is always available for continuity of services.
“The HIE is data driven and the data provides the narrative. If the participants of the HIE share as much data as possible, the HIE becomes THE source of truth. This is ultimately the value of a HIE.” Dr. Rolan Christian
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