German healthcare provider engages Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to help unlock the digital front door, using Red Hat Cloud Services to increase access and scale for patient services
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that BITMARCK collaborated with Red Hat to evolve and expand its business to better meet the changing needs of healthcare patients and providers throughout Germany.
Through an 11-week Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency, BITMARCK built a new patient-facing mobile application that enables insurers to more securely provide improved access to appointment data, medical records, vaccination status, prescriptions, and more. Together, BITMARCK and Red Hat designed a scalable architecture based on Red Hat Integration and Red Hat OpenShift API Management, running on Red Hat OpenShift. This enables the BITMARCK IT team to offer around-the-clock support to users and supply a set of integrations that can easily be packaged for different clients—all while facilitating compliance with European and German data protection laws.
The Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement is part of a broader transformation initiative for BITMARCK as it responds to the changing needs and preferences of patients. Patient interactions are increasingly shifting from traditional customer interaction models to a cohesive digital experience that brings together interactions at every major touchpoint of the patient journey– also known as the “digital front door.” According to industry analyst firm IDC, “by 2023 65% of patients will have accessed care through a digital front door as healthcare providers look for better ways to improve access, engagements, and experiences across all services.”
For BITMARCK, which provides managed IT services for more than 85% of Germany’s statutory insurers, this presented an opportunity to innovate from its established B2B offering to provide a customer-facing, self-service application, GesundheitsCockpit, to connect patients and providers and expand access to health information. The application can be white-labeled and used by multiple healthcare providers to improve customer experiences.
To accomplish this, Red Hat assisted BITMARCK in implementing a scalable application architecture in the patient care application based on Red Hat Integration. Designed to connect applications and data across hybrid cloud environments, Red Hat Integration is a containerized solution that provides service composition and orchestration, application connectivity and data transformation, real-time message streaming, and more. By utilizing a containerized solution, API management is simplified, allowing BITMARCK to scale based on need, employ modifications without having to restart the application, and streamline testing.
With the foundation for the application architecture established, BITMARCK implemented Red Hat OpenShift API Management, run partly on OpenShift on Amazon Web Services, which is included in Red Hat’s family of cloud services designed for developing cloud native applications. The cloud-based solution enables BITMARCK to deliver application connectivity without having to invest in new operational resources, enabling the company to scale, deliver, and manage new application experiences to customers, while tailoring and branding its healthcare app to a provider’s specifications. OpenShift API Management offers scalable and repeatable integrations, which when paired with Red Hat Integration, enables BITMARCK to work with a variety of clients in the public cloud. It also allows them to connect on-premises systems to the customer-facing apps while still enabling data security and regulatory compliance.
Now, with a market-differentiating mobile application experience, BITMARCK has increased customer retention and reached new audiences. The Red Hat-powered application has enabled insurers to customize the mobile experience based on their needs, and given patients more access to their medical records and prescriptions.
“We’re proud to collaborate with BITMARCK, a company that is reshaping the healthcare industry in Europe. Their innovative cloud-based solution using Red Hat Cloud Services will provide scale and flexibility, while allowing them to maintain data security and compliance in a very important industry.”
Ken Johnson, vice president and general manager, Application Services, Red Hat
“Red Hat successfully supported us while we launched our cloud-based solution. With the flexibility that the Red Hat Integration provided, supported by the foundation of Red Hat OpenShift, we were able to modernize our business offerings quickly and with ease. Not only does this application move the needle for our business, it allows us to support our healthcare customers at a time when they need access to patients and providers throughout their health journey.”
Dirk Schäfers, Chief Enterprise Architect, BITMARCK
