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“Health+ is building a high-stability, high-security, and high-contingency healthcare IoT platform with FET Cloud facilitated by the VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) to provide the most cost-efficient solutions for health facilities and thereby boost the future innovation and development of smart healthcare.”
In response to the national rise of health awareness, Health+ officially started operations in 2014 to provide the public with convenient and reliable cloud health management services. To meet the expectations of most users, Health+ has extended its reach to provide services for health facilities. By linking personal physiological measurements and the medical record system, Health+ facilitates physicians to make more accurate diagnoses and medical decisions.
Early in the establishment of Health+, the company decided to build its own cloud with the FET Cloud based on the VMware Full SDDC technology to ensure secure, stable, and flexible operations. Because FET had signed up for the VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP), it could get things right all at once. With the VMware vCloud Director multi-tenancy management platform provided under VCPP, and by defining data center elements with software such as vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and Operation Manager, FET built a scalable, pay-as-you-go, and localized public cloud solution, i.e., the FET Cloud. Health+, by constantly expanding its service scope with the FET Cloud, helps medical facilities implement system integration and develop functions such as intelligent appointment systems, intelligent wards, intelligent nurses’ stations, and more. During development, VMware, FET supplying VCPPIaaS, and SYSAGE distributing VCPP have provided indispensable support to Health+.
Health+ is an SaaS brand of smart healthcare. As the team members specializing in software development are unfamiliar with the tuning, setup, and maintenance of IT infrastructures, they need the assistance from professional IaaS partners.
After repeated consideration, Health+ decided to use the FET Cloud to first of all ensure the localization of health data in Taiwan for compliance with healthcare regulatory requirements and second of all because healthcare services are a matter of life and death that demand high security and high stability. Hence, various products and technologies supplied by VMWare were needed to enable Health+ to pass stringent tests.
For example, Health+ achieved micro-segmentation by defining firewalls with VMWare NSX to ensure the segmentation and non-interoperability of the networks and applications of individual health facilities in order to minimize worries about breaches of confidential and sensitive data.
More importantly, besides passing the certification of important systems such as ISO 27001 information security management, ISO 27017 information security management for cloud services, ISO 27018 protection of personally identifiable information (PII), and CSA STAR, the FET Cloud also strengthened network data transmission security with independently developed patented encryption technology, enabling Health+ to convince more customers with worry-free data security.
In addition, thanks to FET Cloud’s outstanding performance and scalability, Health+ can effectively fulfill service level agreements (SLAs) and maintain a constant and smooth service tempo with the highest IT efficiency and agility with the most cost-effective investment.
Three years ago, the VCPP cloud services evolved into the SDDC architecture, introducing a range of novel vSphere-based functions such as NSX, automation, operations, and more, with a pay-as-you-go policy. That is, customers will not need to make huge capital investments to constantly upgrade cloud services. In addition, SDDC enables easier hardware-software integration, accelerates the search for problems and troubleshooting, thereby enhancing service stability.
After using the VMware-based FET Cloud, Health+ can enjoy the benefits from the continual improvement of IaaS without worrying about infrastructure operation and maintenance in order to provide customers with high-efficiency and high-stability services using the most agile and effective resource management mechanism facilitated by the currently most advanced SDDC architecture. In addition, SDDC also enables the Health+ R&D team to focus on the design of application functions and interfaces to form a virtuous circle. Besides earning the praise of more health facilities and consumers and expanding the customer base, the reputation and visibility of the Health+ brand has also improved.
Seeing the competitive advantage of FET’s signing up for VCPP, Health+ believes that it could quickly build the most secure, most reliable, and most flexible operational architecture with the FET Cloud as a localized public cloud to maintain an outstanding service level in terms of either customer count or web access traffic. Hence, it decided to team up with FET.
It takes a minimum of 90 days for health facilities to build their own healthcare IoT platform at their own expenses for both hardware and software operation and maintenance. By contrast, it takes about 2 to 4 weeks to complete the construction, setup, connection, and account creation of a platform with Health+, thus significantly shortening the lead-time of service availability.
Health+ customers only need to pay for the service and VMWare software fees based on their actual usage on a monthly or pay-as-you-go basis, without sharing the maintenance cost. Following the escalation of incentives including lower service costs and shorter service lead-times, Health+ has attracted over 80 health facilities to join the platform.
Thanks to the VMWare technology and with the advantages of resource scalability and multi-tenancy security, Health+ is constantly developing services without worries. Today, the targets of data collection have been expanded to medical kits, freezers, IVs, mattresses, and all kinds of smart IoT devices to help health facilities implement innovative applications such as intelligent wards and intelligent nurses’ stations. In the future, Health+ will integrate core systems such as hospital information systems to expand into the telecare and long-term care markets and strengthen its operational competitiveness.
