Bitmarck Uses Red Hat to Maximize Patient-Facing Opportunities

Bitmarck

Bitmarck, provider of managed IT services to Germany’s statutory health insurers, wanted to broaden its service offering with secure mobile applications accessed directly by patients. Bitmarck’s IT team looked to Red Hat® OpenShift® API Management for a cloud-based solution that  would deliver application connectivity rapidly, without having to employ additional staff.

Some 85% of Germany’s statutory health insurers are Bitmarck clients, collectively employing over 30,000 staff. Previously, the business focused on back-end IT services and software, but recent innovations and economic pressures in the German healthcare market led Bitmarck to develop new customer offerings.

Rising innovation and growing levels of economic pressure have led German IT services provider Bitmarck to rethink its strategy and broaden its scope, with the main aim of improving customer retention. Having previously focused on back-end IT services and software for German healthcare insurers, Bitmarck was looking to develop services and apps that could be accessed directly by patients, primarily as a mobile experience.

Bitmarck’s IT team needed to provide 24/7 services and an easily assembled set of integrations for different clients that would also remain compliant with strict European and German healthcare data protection laws. The technical complexities that Bitmarck would have to manage on their own, compounded by the challenges of new customer demands, would make it harder for Bitmarck to quickly deliver software and shorten turnaround times for their clients.

Bitmarck decided to turn to cloud services so that it could focus more time and resources on providing value to their customers, instead of managing more infrastructure. . An API-first, microservices-based approach would enable Bitmarck to deliver a variety of applications more efficiently to meet the needs of patients.

With rising demand for reduced times to market, Bitmarck realized that a cloud-based API management solution would meet the requirements for their  new operating environment. However, the business had not previously deployed a cloud solution and therefore lacked the necessary experience to work safely in a hybrid environment.

Being able to manage intense transaction loads while delivering high levels of performance, especially in the business-to-business market, Bitmarck needed to interact with a trusted vendor and utilize enterprise support to scale. The business also needed a partner that could enable and maximize the effectiveness of their in-house resources.

An 11-week Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency gave Bitmarck the foundation to build a new patient-facing mobile application that enables insurers to provide improved access to appointment data, medical records, vaccination status and prescriptions.

Bitmarck and Red Hat then designed a scalable architecture based on Red Hat Integration and Red Hat OpenShift API Management, running on Red Hat OpenShift. This enables Bitmarck’s IT team to take full advantage of the power of the cloud and offer 24-hour support to users while remaining compliant with local data protection laws. Bitmarck’s team can now deliver application connectivity without having to invest in new operational resources.

Software and Services

• Red Hat Integration
• Red Hat Open Innovation Labs
• Red Hat OpenShift
• Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated
•  

Bitmarck can now scale and deliver new application experiences to its customers. The business’s first new application, Das GesundheitsCockpit, now makes Bitmarck’s services available directly to patients through a mobile platform. Patients can access helpful services such as reviews of prescriptions to ensure there are no adverse effects when taking multiple medications. Insurers using the service can also customize the mobile experience based on their specific needs.

Functionalities such as load testing now give Bitmarck’s IT teams an idea of the number of transactions per second an application will be required to handle. Compared to its previous infrastructure, this simpler process enables Bitmarck’s teams to build and deploy applications faster than before–often in a few hours The platform enables scalable and repeatable integrations for different clients on the public cloud, while maintaining compliance with data protection regulations in the new cloud environment.

Now that Bitmarck is faster in bringing products to market and deploying them in different datacenters, running automatic testing as a part of the pipeline, the provider plans to add other use cases to this new mobile experience. Bitmarck  anticipates growing opportunities for cross-selling as customer requirements continue to evolve.