Cloud Medical Device Data System

Client/Summary

The RND Group recently completed a project to implement a Medical Device Data System (MDDS) that replaced a legacy application for processing and diagnosing Holter Monitor data. The client monitors over 1M patients and processes over 30K physician orders per year for its cardiac monitoring devices.

The Challenge

A scalable solution was needed to replace a slow, labor-intensive PC-based software application.  The legacy software application ran on a dedicated PC and took over 4 hours to process data from a single monitoring device. To dramatically scale its cardiac monitoring solutions, the client needed a solution that did not require dedicated hardware, did not require a person to launch the application, and it needed to reduce the processing time for each monitoring device from hours to minutes.

Additional challenges for the replacement solution was to provide the ability to handle cardiac monitoring data from different device types with similar, but incompatible data formats and to be able to handle future device types and data formats without disruption to the solution.

The Solution

The RND Group leveraged its extensive cloud development experience to build a solution with the following characteristics:

·         Capable of ingesting large cardiac telemetry binary data, with up to 30k data files ingested / day

·         The system scales dynamically through use of serverless (infinitely scalable) processing

·         Architected as a multi-step pipeline of services that processes data and identifies events of interest for call center technicians to review

·         Each step of the pipeline process can scale independently and can be tested / updated independently

·         Isolation of the Results Processing algorithm component to allow medical device functionality to be separated from the Medical Device Data System functionality, reducing the overall regulatory requirements

·         Data from an individual monitoring device is processed in less than 10 minutes

Technical requirements addressed by the solution include:

1.       Maintaining data Integrity between devices and the cloud

2.       Security of data transmission

3.       Security of all data in the cloud

4.       Managing scalability and performance when multiple devices are communicating with the cloud

5.       Detecting and managing changes to the software stack performed by the cloud provider after the solution has been verified

6.       HIPAA compliance

7.       Cybersecurity

Technologies Used

·         Microsoft Azure Serverless Technology

·         Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)

·         Docker

·         Kubernetes

·         C#

·         Linux