Relias, formerly WhiteCloud Analytics, provides a comprehensive learning platform for their customers with the goal of helping to reduce healthcare organization variation in care through personalized learning, performance metrics, and assessments. Relias’ mission is tied to helping healthcare organizations provide better care while lowering costs. With a focus on improving organizational efficiency and care expertise, Relias can help healthcare organizations improve the care they’re currently providing by giving them actionable insights the organization can consume.
The Challenge
When it comes to learning and development within an organization, it’s difficult to identify where people need more training and where to focus and prioritize efforts within an organization. Relias provides a new approach to training that isn’t just a standalone learning platform but rather a unified experience that provides course recommendations based upon skills gaps from within the performance of an organization. This unique, multi-faceted approach made the use of cloud a necessity.
Prior to moving to the cloud, they utilized a private data center that was HIPAA compliant. While this worked initially, it became obvious that they could achieve better results financially via the cloud, particularly relating to the on-demand, start/stop capability for their test machines. They initially chose AWS as their cloud platform because of this capability, but soon discovered that the cloud lacked the security and compliance that their private data center provided.
WhiteCloud’s expertise was in their analytics and insights platform and not in the security and compliance that is required to host sensitive PHI data in AWS. They needed a partner with proven healthcare compliance and security expertise.
The Solution
The team at WhiteCloud, now Relias, chose ClearDATA, who helped them leverage a DevOps approach to automated compliance. Their application relies heavily on compute, and as a result, ClearDATA’s automation ensures that the required security controls are in place when EC2 instances are provisioned and destroyed. For example, their EC2 AMIs use an orchestration agent that automatically installs security agents such as Anti-Virus and Intrusion Detection. Through the use of a mature software and automation pipeline, they can ensure that their cloud is secure while they take advantage of the utility-based economics of cloud solutions.
Relias can leverage the benefits of the cloud and build their applications by directly accessing EC2 knowing that security and compliance is managed by ClearDATA—and not their team. The credentials of ClearDATA also provide additional credibility for their own customers who will not buy a solution that is not proven to be compliant and secure. With the Compliance Dashboard, Relias can prove their environment is compliant currently as well as over a period of time via trend reports.
Relias takes advantage of ClearDATA’s event driven compliance architecture, which leverages tools such as CloudWatch Events, Lambda, Kinesis, and API Gateway to continuously monitor telemetry within the AWS environment for potential anomalies or deviations in compliance posture. ClearDATA and Relias use DevOps concepts such as CI/CD and automated deployment to add additional compliance safeguards, allowing Relias to focus on their applications and their core business needs.
The Results
This valuable partnership has allowed Relias to be one of the market leaders in healthcare helping healthcare organizations improve the type and speed of care they provide through personalized and engaged learning. The AWS cloud, along with the ClearDATA Automated Safeguard platform, allows Relias to innovate their analytics and core business applications at a much quicker rate. The use of DevOps services and principles allows them to do it not only quicker, but reliably and repeatably, which allows Relias to focus on their business and leave the security and compliance to the experts.
