MediaAgility was acquired by Persistent in May 2022 and its capabilities form the foundation for Persistent’s Google Business Unit. As a Google Cloud Partner and a strategic IT Transformation services provider, the Google Business Unit is focused on delivering transformational services with cloud-native solutions that enable businesses to stay relevant and benefit from the public cloud platform capabilities.
Google Cloud results
- Allows data to be accessed from multiple platforms with the flexibility of Google Cloud
- Helps consolidate data in one place and make predictions for the future with BigQuery
- Saves costs with the ability of Google Kubernetes Engine to scale up and down quickly in real time
Paperwork can be a very time consuming aspect of healthcare. In the United States, doctors spend an average of nine hours a week on administrative tasks. To help practitioners save time and energy, TRIARQ, which has its headquarters in Troy, Michigan, partners with medical organizations in the US to manage the business side of their practice.
“By taking care of the business tasks for medical practitioners, we help them focus on their core competency, which is to provide medical care to their patients,” says Yaw Kwakye, Co-founder and Chief Architect at TRIARQ. “We partner for better outcomes through well-engineered proprietary business processes and technology that help refine every aspect of their medical practice. Clinical process streamlining and quality outcomes powered by technology is what we do best for our partners.” To further improve its service offerings, TRIARQ turned to Google Cloud.
Google Cloud gives our development teams, tech support team, performance managers, and billing experts, clients, and patients the flexibility to access servers from anywhere, through their mobile phone, web browser, or tablet, which gives us flexibility to service our clients
Yaw Kwakye, Co-founder and Chief Architect, TRIARQ
More flexibility and easier accessibility
Before deploying Google Cloud, TRIARQ serviced its clients using monolithic applications on legacy systems. “We worked on a client-server-based environment, where most of our applications were very heavy single stacks. It didn’t give us much flexibility and restricted the agility of our operations,” says Yaw. Its legacy systems were also unable to support the different operating systems and often faced conversion issues such as major operating system or database upgrades. “With Google Cloud being an open source platform, we’re able to rapidly develop new tools that are agnostic of operating systems. We can deploy quickly and reduce costs from unnecessary software licensing and duplicate infrastructures,” Yaw says.
Since migrating to Google Cloud in 2019 with the help of its consulting partner MediaAgility, which has its headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey, the company has been able to modernize its platform, making it more accessible. According to Yaw: “Google Cloud gives our development teams, tech support team, performance managers, billing experts, clients, and patients the flexibility to access servers from anywhere, through their mobile phone, web browser, or tablet, which gives us flexibility to service our clients.”
TRIARQ also deployed Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which has allowed a much more flexible environment. “With Google Kubernetes Engine, we’re able to control and automate our deployments. We can optimize resources by configuring them at the lowest possible combination and increase them only when the demand increases.” Yaw says that this functionality of being able to scale up and down quickly helps the company keep costs low.
More importantly, the ease of use and transparency of GKE helps TRIARQ to monitor its resources closely. “Google Kubernetes Engine gives us a good overview of our resources, so we can see exactly where we need to scale up or down at any time.”
Kamal Puri, Partner at MediaAgility, talks about how his team supported TRIARQ developers in using GKE: “Enabling development teams to design and build architectures suited for Kubernetes was initially a big challenge. Through multiple workshops and training sessions, we were able to help these teams modernize their first microservice within two weeks.”
With BigQuery, we’re able to consolidate all of our transactional data, past and present, into a single location. We can then report and come up with very specific insights, which we analyze to predict future data
Yaw Kwakye, Co-founder and Chief Architect, TRIARQ
Charting a roadmap with BigQuery
Another area that TRIARQ wanted to improve was the visibility of its data and the ability to make more sense of it. For this, it decided to use BigQuery, a highly scalable data warehouse. “With BigQuery, we’re able to consolidate all of our transactional data, past and present, into a single location. We can then report and come up with very specific insights, which we analyze to predict future data,” says Yaw. From e-prescriptions to lab results and appointments, to the more complex revenue-cycle data and value-base analysis, it builds dashboards with BigQuery using business intelligence software Tableau, where financial analysis and a range of other reports are created.
“The ability to predict future data based on a patient’s history, for example, enables us to provide actionable recommendations to our clients in real time,” says Yaw.
The insights that BigQuery delivers have also helped provide a direction for TRIARQ. “The capabilities of BigQuery have helped us develop an environment to set more strategic directions in terms of where we want to go. By having a clear picture of where we are now, we can understand what the future would or should be like. Because
Limitless possibilities
No longer stuck in a siloed environment, Yaw already has big plans for the company in 2020. “Moving to Google Cloud is a big shift from where we were before. We were limited by technology that did not allow us to scale. Beyond improving our existing technology and ability to develop and deploy rapidly, Google Cloud has been an enabler for us to do so much more and has given us the flexibility to plan for products that would not have been possible before,” he says.
A key product in the pipeline is a medical app to be launched by mid 2020, which can connect medical practitioners from around the world. “The idea is to have one healthcare solution for a global audience. We want people to have access to doctors from around the world at their fingertips. We want patients to have actionable information about their care when they are talking to their care providers. We want healthcare providers to be able to socialize in care teams and communicate like never before, and we want everyone within the healthcare ecosystem to know what role each one is playing in the complex web of care provision. For example, someone in India could get a second opinion from a doctor in China or Africa,” says Yaw. “Patients and providers could have social groups through which care could be coordinated. And by using the Cloud Healthcare API, we can integrate our platform with any and all electronic health records (EHRs) that support Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and flexible integration with everyday social platforms, while respecting protected health information (PHI) and other compliance.”
The biggest differentiator is Google Cloud and MediaAgility’s services and flexibility to work together as a team. Whenever we reach out for help, the team is always readily available to help us dig deep and advise on the best practices for us
Yaw Kwakye, Co-founder and Chief Architect, TRIARQ
Smooth deployment and a hands-on approach
Despite having to move multiple monolithic applications into the cloud, Yaw says that the transition to Google Cloud has been a seamless one. “When we embarked on this journey, the team from MediaAgility came on-site to provide us with training and a step-by-step tutorial on the migration process. It also helps that Google Cloud is designed intuitively, making it easy to learn the processes.”
Even after the initial migration, Yaw says that the Google Cloud and MediaAgility team continues to be very proactive in responding to queries. “We like the technology that Google provides, but for us, the biggest differentiator is Google Cloud and MediaAgility’s services and flexibility to work together as a team. Whenever we reach out for help, the team is always readily available to help us dig deep and advise on the best practices for us, keeping in mind the sensitivity of data that we deal with.”
Data security and compliance were two major requirements when dealing with PHI data in various formats. Both TRIARQ and our teams always kept security in design from the beginning of data modernization workstreams and ensured that we had controls in order to comply with HIPAA and HITRUST requirements
Kamal Puri, Partner at MediaAgility
Bringing it all back to the vision of the company, Yaw adds: “The future of this industry will need to be a global one, and we can no longer be stuck in legacy systems if we want to survive. Having a team that is passionate about supporting us in this journey is definitely a plus point.”
This story is originally published on Google Cloud blog.
