Baysil is a Waterloo-based technology company that is looking to revolutionize the way non-physician healthcare providers support their patients. Their team has expertise in both the healthcare sector and software engineering, making their organization unique. Baysil has a platform solution that will keep patients engaged in treatment plans, while not requiring a large time commitment from care providers. To validate that their solution meets the set of privacy and security controls needed to function in the healthcare marketplace, as well as can function at scale, they have come to CENGN to complete a Cloud project.

THE NEED FOR BETTER HEALTHCARE SOLUTIONS

The healthcare industry is massive, with many different disciplines and specialties. However, despite its’s clear size and impact, this is a sector that is still largely encumbered by inefficiencies and a lack of personalization for treatment plans.

In the non-physician realm, patients work with healthcare providers, such as a physical therapist, for long term treatment plans. Most of these treatments need many visits, regular check-ins, and status updates. Unfortunately, the current state of this industry is defined by notorious wait times due to the scarcity of healthcare providers as well as the requirement for on-location visits. This can lead to patient disengagement and a major drop out of clients for health practitioners.

While there are some products on the market that offer a solution to these problems in the form of digital health records, these only offer a minor level of patient engagement by sending reminders to patients about the steps they should be taking throughout the treatment process. These solutions do not provide active monitoring, and also requires practitioners to do additional work. This is a cumbersome and time-consuming process and only adds to the onerousness of the process with only marginal benefits.

PERSONALIZING TREATMENT PLANS

Baysil has developed a cloud-based intelligent health record application addressing the disengagement issues within the healthcare industry. The solution is offered as a service and is currently geared towards physical rehabilitation clinics and physical therapy treatment plans, with plans to roll out the platform into other areas within the sector soon.

Here’s how the platform works: Providers use the platform to enter basic instructions for a patient’s treatment plan in their custom profile. Using AI and Natural Language Processing, the platform automatically turns those instructions into a customized care plan taking into account patient preferences, prescribing exercises, diets and other elements for the patient.

The solution will automatically integrate all of the patient’s progress into their health record, which provides valuable metrics that will help further customize the treatment plan as time goes on. Through this process, the platform is continuously learning, and the care plan can be continuously customized to meet the specific needs of the patient.

Through a pilot test of their solution within a public rehab clinic, Baysil confirmed that implementing their technology improved patient satisfaction, and thus, improved patient retention. This retention is paramount to a successful practitioner business; for clinics, a 5% increase in patient retention will increase profits by at least 25%. Not only this but through the time saved by the Baysil platform (3 minutes per 15-minute appointment), healthcare providers can see 8 more patients daily which translates to approximately $120k in additional annual revenue.

MEETING CUSTOMER AND INDUSTRY NEEDS

In order to reach their commercial goals, Baysil needs to validate that their platform can handle the traffic generated by an ever-increasing number of practitioner and patient users. To meet the needs of their projected growth over the next 12 months, Baysil needs to validate their solution can support 700 concurrent users, 500 practitioners and 200 patients.

Baysil must also verify that their solution complies with Canada’s healthcare privacy and security legislation, as set out in the PIPEDA and PHIPA guidelines. These guidelines define the requirements for data residency, encryption, authentication, access control, audit logging, input controls, consent management, and network security management, and are a requirement for any company looking to sell their product in the health sector.

To prepare their platform for market and tackle these requirements, Baysil will validate its solution in a CENGN project.

TESTING IN A CONTAINERIZED ENVIRONMENT

For this project, Baysil will be using real patient data to properly scale test their solution on the CENGN Cloud-Native Testbed. As CENGN’s infrastructure is a completely secure and isolated environment, they can test their solution without the fear of compromising sensitive patient data.

Their solution will be deployed in a containerized environment, using Kubernetes, which will be a first for the Baysil platform. Containerization is widely regarded as the most efficient way to scale a network to meet the demands of multiple customers and heavier traffic loads, something Baysil can take advantage of as they grow their customer base. CENGN staff will be providing their technical expertise on containerization to advise Baysil on best practices for properly orchestrating containers throughout the project, so the company can make the most out of the technology.

Upon completion of the project, the company will have measured resource requirements and network costs at different user loads so they are armed with the information needed to deliver their services to different sized customers. In addition to scaling, they will be testing for security, using tools provided by CENGN to evaluate the performance of the platform against various cyber attacks. This will allow Baysil to identify areas of vulnerabilities and make any required improvements before product launch.

CENGN is pleased to give Baysil access to our infrastructure services as they work to complete this project!

Baysil is a growing Canadian business that is using the services at CENGN through the Next Generation Network Program (NGNP). The NGNP is a Government of Ontario program offered through a partnership between CENGN and the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) that is providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Ontario access to the CENGN Testbed. CENGN’s digital infrastructure is connecting SMEs like Baysil to state-of-the-art equipment and network services, which will allow these companies to test and validate their solutions. 

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About the Author

Being the Content Marketing Lead at CENGN, Richard researches and shares information on emerging technologies such as 5G, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence.

Through his experience in writing and support for technological growth, he’s always interested in sharing how new technologies are shaping the lives of fellow Canadians.

More by Richard Galazzo