Idea and concept
MENS turned out to be a life-changing project and has boosted RIVO AGENCY and challenged us to prove our expertise and skills.
Brief history of the company
MENS is an innovative American clinic that managed to go fully online and provide the full chain of service for the customer from the registration to the delivery of the drugs directly to the customer’s address. The idea appeared to be bright and totally flexible in terms of time and services for both: clinic and its customers, so it has created a total win-win situation. The most specific part of this clinic is focused only on men’s health problems because men tend to ignore them or are too shy to go for a doctor’s check. The online presence of the clinic made it easier and brought real relief to lots of clients across the US.
Specifics and core idea
For us, RIVO AGENCY, the project appeared to be unusual, challenging, and yet no less attractive to test us out and empower our skills and experience. The main specific thing here was to create a platform in 3 domains simultaneously, in particular: healthcare, e-Commerce, and fintech. The core idea was to provide clients with full flexibility in treatment and make the process much more comfortable as well.
We had to create something out of the regular human understanding of the clinic, we had to create a medical system with a full service-billing-delivery cycle that would close all the needs of the clients in medical checks and treatment.
The platform aimed to join three main components of the supply chain: patients, doctors, and sure thing, medical suppliers, so the client could order and get everything he or she needs in one place.
To achieve that we had to create an exact client’s product roadmap, taking into account the expertise and requirements of our own customer and our expertise from the technical side in terms of development and architecture.
After a while, we managed to find a perfect client’s product roadmap:
Client’s platform visit->Registration form->General questionnaire (to understand client’s basic needs and intentions)-> Choice of the tarification->Doctor’s review->Doctor’s check->Subsribing the treatment and drugs on the platform (in case the client is alright his card will be filled with some additional info and get the “hold” status)->Subscribtion’s activation (provided under the hood ) -> Creation of the connection with a medical supplier to prepare treatment -> Order creation-> Delivery.
Time has proven that this scheme worked out rather well and earned the trust and popularity after a short period of time.
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Architecture and tech stack
As far as we dealt with clinics and healthcare, every architectural and tech solution had to stick to and cover HIPAA standards. In addition to all of that, our customers wanted us to provide the highest level of security and consistency in the system. Sure thing that had its impact on the architecture building and the tech stack used.
The first natural thing to do is to take the hosting. In our case, it was AWS hosting that is able to cover HIPAA standards. Once we have chosen AWS, S3 seemed to be an obvious option as a simple storage of data. To provide secure authorization we have used Amazon Cognito.
To make everything secure and safe, and build a powerful security ecosystem one of our top priorities was to implement VPC peering connection that would allow us to facilitate the transfer of data and establish peering relationships between VPCs across different AWS Regions, resources in the VPCs (for example, EC2 instances and Lambda functions) in different AWS Regions can communicate with each other using private IP addresses, without using a gateway, VPN connection, or network appliance. The traffic remains in the private IP space. All inter-Region traffic is encrypted with no single point of failure or bandwidth bottleneck. Traffic always stays on the global AWS backbone, and never traverses the public internet, which reduces threats, such as common exploits, and DDoS attacks. Inter-Region VPC peering provides a simple and cost-effective way to share resources between regions or replicate data for geographic redundancy.
In that way, we have ensured the equal distribution of the data to the partitions and the consistency of data.
Every system needs to have a database, for us MongoDB Atlas has become the most suitable option because of several reasons:
- HIPAA coverage
- Both sides of data encryption
- Dynamic data smooth processing
- Provision of VPC peering
- Equal data distribution to the partitions
- Provision of data consistency
- Upscaling of the instance type to stand the peak loads
- Downscaling once the load is minimal
- Auto backups’ provision
Taking into account the load and amount of data we have decided to take M40 instance type with 4 shards (1 master, 3 replicas) with 4 Tb each. That solution gave us the most optimal and smooth work.
Medical data is totally sensitive so taking proper security measures is an absolute must in that case. That pushed us to use such technologies and solutions as:
- Mongo Crypt for encryption of client’s data
- Bastion AWS for a secure network access
- Cloudtrail to ensure the logging of all platform’s functions according to the HIPAA standard
- AWS Key management service to give secured keys to customers
- AWS secrets manager to manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, application credentials, OAuth tokens, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycles
In terms of technologies used to create the whole platform, we found Node.js, Express.js, and Vue.js to be a perfect choice because of their stability, powerfulness, ecosystem, and the set of best practices to use.
Regarding architecture, our team has stopped on the monolith + serverless model. The monolith allowed us to handle API requests and enhance the speed of work of the admin panel. As for serverless then it was applied to provide the full billing cycle to a client.
The architecture had to be secure, agile, open to implementations and scalability, and highly stable in case of emergencies and high loads.
To deliver it we have provided an IAM role for each Lamda and EC2 instances to protect the data and encrypt it as well.
We wanted to equip the system with stability and make it easy to implement some new features or new things. To make it properly we have used CI/CD blue-green deployment patterns, so in case of implementation of something new or when a high load appears the system could switch to another newer instance without hard and data loss.
In order to enhance flexibility we made strong third-party services integration without any headaches. That means, whatever our client wants to connect the platform with some new payment system or something else we could do it in no time and without any risks of failure.
So in addition to the connected services like authorize.net, geniusRx, shipmentStation, stripe, and so on, we could add literary everything to make our customer and his clients happy.
Explore our article: “Best practices for developing scalable and maintainable Vue.js applications“
Methodology and our approach
In order to build such a big platform we had to stick to some methods to control our work, provide high quality and make everything on time. At the very beginning, we took SCRUM as the most effective approach and managed to provide a useful increment every two weeks, so our customer was absolutely satisfied with the flow of work and its efficiency. After some time our PM added Kanban to SCRUM because we had new processes and had to provide maintenance and support of the product. In that way, we commenced to work according to Scrumban and that allowed us to split work even more effectively and provide 24/7 support to the client.
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https://www.mens.com/Review
RIVO AGENCY’s team turned out to be the real professionals in healthcare. We were pleased by their experience and deep knowledge of the sphere, because it opened new horizons and opportunities for us. They advised and created the functionality that helped our business to grow and gain new clients each day. The cooperation and result are brilliant!
