This year, we received nominations across dozens of industries for the annual MongoDB Innovation Awards that recognize organizations and individuals that took a giant idea and made a tangible impact on the world. The winners will be honored at MongoDB World 2017 , in Chicago on June 20 and 21. But we’re so excited about some of the winners we wanted to share their stories before the event. This year, Phreesia won the MongoDB Innovation Award for Scale.
Here’s why:
Improving Patient Experience
Patient care and organizational efficiency are vastly improved today, thanks to technology innovation that is connecting hospitals, insurance providers, doctors’ offices, and patients. Phreesia, a company at the heart of this movement, is helping healthcare providers better manage, access, and store patient information so the healthcare organization can focus on what they do best: doctor-patient interactions, diagnosis, and treatment. Phreesia’s software as a service (SaaS) is also pushing the power of self-service to improve the patient experience, as it enables patients to complete their registration on their home computer or mobile device before they arrive at a clinic. Patients can also pay copays and outstanding balances through their mobile device or Phreesia hardware in the waiting room.
For over 10 years, healthcare providers all over the country have integrated Phreesia’s software into their electronic medical record/practice management systems. Today, Phreesia manages intake for over 50 million patients annually and has checked in more than 15% of the U.S. population. On the payment side alone, Phreesia processes tens of millions of transactions per year, significantly streamlining healthcare organizations’ workflow. In addition to improving efficiency and profitability, Phreesia also uses its database to administer clinical screeners to patients and alert clinical staff about the need for a test or treatment.
Diagnosis and Treatment
Phreesia was built on relational databases, but in recent years the volume and variety of patient data being managed on some parts of the platform led the company to look for alternatives. Certain workloads – particularly the patient intake information – were posing problems because of the wide variety of formats and data types that would need to be processed. Alongside that variety, there was another challenge: volume.
Securely storing and managing several million insurance claims for every major insurer is no small feat. To get there, Phreesia migrated its eligibility application away from relational databases and on to MongoDB, to take advantage of the flexibility of the document model to better handle this rapidly expanding volume and variety of data.
To ensure the migration process was smooth and no downtime affected customers, Phreesia called on MongoDB’s consulting engineers. The professional services team helped Phreesia avoid common pitfalls and equipped them with best practices from the start of their journey with MongoDB, helping the developers focus on building value for patients and not wrangling infrastructure.
Now running on MongoDB 3.4, Phreesia’s eligibility application covers the gamut of the ‘run-up appointment’ processes, which allows patients to proactively pre-register, manage copayments, and ensure all their personal contact, medical history, and insurance information is accurate and up to date. This information is seamlessly pushed to their physicians quickly and in advance of the doctor visit. Importantly, insurance providers are contacted directly to make certain all patient information is accurate and current.
Reliability, Security, Scalability – With a Lower Total Cost
Performance and ease of development aren’t enough in the healthcare sector. Security and regulatory requirements are always the first priority. To address those concerns and ensure the SaaS platform had best-in-class data layer security, Phreesia used MongoDB’s encrypted storage engine, available with MongoDB Enterprise Advanced. This native encryption, along with the other advanced security features of MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, help Phreesia meet the regulatory requirements of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) and PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards). To monitor, automate, and back up the deployment, as well as support disaster recovery, Phreesia relies on MongoDB’s cloud-hosted management tool, Cloud Manager.
Dan Nathan, VP of Engineering at Phreesia, said: “Downtime or data loss isn’t an option when you’re dealing with this kind of information. MongoDB has given us the confidence that our customers have secure, always-on, and reliable access to data.”
“MongoDB does what we need it to do by scaling independently of the application, no matter how many millions of patients we’re processing,” added Nathan. “The fantastic thing is we get this scale and flexibility, all at a lower total cost of ownership.”
Phreesia manages the administrative tasks of patient intake so medical professionals can focus on the important stuff – managing the health and wellbeing of their patients. In much the same way, MongoDB’s document data model is helping Phreesia developers focus on what’s most important – building new applications and features so they can continue delivering critical services for millions of patients and practitioners. Phreesia is a clear and deserving winner in the Scale category for the MongoDB Innovation Awards 2017.