Accelerating MVP for Covid-19 Testing App Using AWS Cloud Platform

Background

Global Covid-19 pandemic has put medical systems across the world to test with an urgent need for quick testing with immediate results. On average, available on the market tests are taking 48+ hours. This indicated an obvious need for testing facilities which are accessible, affordable, and allow people to get results in the matter of minutes, not days. The rapid testing method would not only work for the sake of comfort of an individual who wants to get tested and go on with their life, but also allows eliminating the risk of asymptomatic Covid-19 carriers spreading further the virus, endangering people around them without even as much as suspecting it.

Client

Spoedtestcorona, a chain of testing centers offering rapid screening tests for Covid-19 to individuals as well as companies in the Netherlands and Belgium. The service provides an extremely reliable rapid test that makes it clear within 15 minutes after the test has been carried out whether there is an infection or not.

Challenge

Spoedtestcorona partnered with Symphony Solutions to make rapid testing for Covid-19 possible by bringing cross-platform web application on the market in two weeks. 

The list of tasks that had to be completed within the client’s tight two-week deadline included building an application integrated with test labs software capable to update available time slots for testing, and an admin portal for test lab employees to enable them uploading the test results, minimizing human mistake factor, while keeping the high level of compliance and data security. The application also had to be highly scalable taking into account the need to serve corporate customers with thousands of employees to be processed. 

Solution

Taking to account the two-week deadline for go-to-market, as well as high compliance requirements of handling personal and medical data, Amazon Web Services platform was chosen for building the cloud native application. Availability of many ready-to-use PaaS solutions enabled us to have the whole development and production infrastructure to be built and automated within two business days: 

• Amazon API Gateway – was used to quickly enable secure and scalable interaction between different parts of application.

• AWS Lambda was selected to replace the traditional backend solution. Ready-to-use serverless-based backend enabled us to skip building-up and maintaining the application server. Everything was working right away.  

• AWS WAF Amazon CloudFront – Firewall and CDN platforms to secure the application and cache the static content, according to the high needs of compliance and scalability.

• Amazon S3 and DynamoDB – as a secure and performing cloud storage and database.

• Amazon EMR and QuickSight – for gathering data from different sources, storying it in the cloud and building flexible reports based on it.

• AWS CloudFormation, Systems Manager and CloudWatch – for quick, reliable and fully automated cloud infrastructure build-up, scaling, monitoring and management.

• Next step was bringing visibility to the web application so that our potential clients could actually find it. Symphony Solutions marketing team within 4 days conducting market research developed an omnichannel digital marketing strategy, prepared a promo campaign, and content plan for further execution.

• Amazon EC2 and ECS – for Microsoft Windows Server based third-party applications required to realize ERP functionality.

• Amazon DirectConnect – for building the secured perimeters with Healthcare third-parties for medical data exchange. 

Result

Within our healthcare software development, we delivered a scalable cross-platform web application, an admin portal and a lead-generating website to streamline Covid-19 testing process for Spoedtestcorona now. 

• The project delivered within extremely tight 2.5-week timeframe.
• The website attracted first clients within the first days of its launch.
• 50 test lab employees working simultaneously.
• Up to 10 locations in the Netherlands and Belgium.
• Cloud infrastructure cost only 20 USD per week