Mosaic Life Care scales portal, maximizes vaccine accessibility with Azure SQL Managed Instance

Edge of on-premises limits

Mosaic Life Care believes in addressing the needs of the whole patient and the community they live in. The healthcare organization operates four hospitals and serves a population of 270,000 people in parts of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa.

Like most healthcare organizations, Mosaic experienced a lot of turmoil because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And it also witnessed a lot of hope when COVID-19 vaccines became available. At the end of 2020, the organization created a vaccine registration portal in its on-premises environment where patients could quickly and easily sign up for a time slot. At that time, the Mosaic IT team didn’t know how much sign-up traffic to expect, and it needed to balance appointment scheduling with vaccine availability.

“When the first doses became available, we released time slots at 6 PM and announced them on social media,” says Brandon Gockley, Vice President of Information Technology at Mosaic Life Care. “We had limited spots available because we had a limited amount of vaccine, but we were all on high alert watching the registration traffic. We watched a slow trickle and then suddenly saw large spikes. We had 300 slots get filled in less than 10 minutes.”

Mosaic wanted to be sure that it could serve all the patients who wanted shots, especially as more populations became eligible and more vaccines became available. In early 2021, the IT team reached out to Microsoft to explore migrating Mosaic’s portal to Azure. “We needed to handle any number of registrations without patients experiencing downtime,” says Gockley. “We tried to think outside the box to make our portal scalable, and that’s when we knew we wanted to move to Azure.”

A highly secure and scalable portal

Mosaic decided to modernize its SQL environment using Azure SQL Managed Instance to run its registration portal. The organization aimed to minimize the stress on its IT team of having to manage SQL servers and worry about scale. “We chose Azure SQL Managed Instance because we understood that by modernizing our environment and using a cloud-native solution, we gained opportunities with our registration portal that we didn’t have with the traditional SQL Server,” says Gockley.

As a healthcare entity, Mosaic wouldn’t have considered this move without being confident in the security options available through Azure. “Organizations often don’t realize that cloud solutions offer more security than traditional on-premises solutions,” says Gockley. “We believe in embracing all the best practices in security and taking advantage of the available security features in Azure to help ensure that our information is as safe as possible.”

Mosaic also took advantage of Azure Database Migration Service to seamlessly migrate its database and used Azure App Service to quickly build and host its site. Mosaic worked closely with Microsoft during this process for support and guidance. “We couldn’t have asked for better support from the Microsoft team,” says Jason Squires, Senior Systems Engineer at Mosaic Life Care. “I already knew a good deal about Azure, but if we had any questions come up, Microsoft responded with the best possible expert resource.”

With an increase in available doses and patient eligibility, the organization needed to move quickly to update the site without any downtime. The technical architecture and security teams focused on moving to Azure while the web team continued to finish coding the vaccination website. “Altogether from an internal scalability test to the move to Azure took less than a month,” says Gockley. “It was very aggressive timeline, but we did it.”

Saved time and effort for IT

Mosaic’s IT team no longer worries about back-end maintenance or infrastructure security. “Using Azure SQL Managed Instance is a no-brainer because we can get the uptime that we need,” says Squires. “We know that we don’t have to maintain the operating system, patching, and security of SQL Server, which makes things much easier for us.”

The solution required little refactoring of existing applications, which meant that Mosaic’s IT team could move quickly. “The application is very well written and very modern,” says Squires. Adds Gockley, “It didn’t take more than a day or two for our developers to make the appropriate modifications to take advantage of the serverless environment. It was all very fast.”

Optimized patient experience

By migrating its registration portal, Mosaic accomplished its number one objective: helping any patient who wants a vaccine to get one quickly and easily. The team balanced its technology needs with the outcomes for its community. “Working on the IT side, I’m sometimes removed from the direct patient impacts,” says Squires. “This was one of the first times I felt close to the result, knowing the technology I helped build was serving patients. Trusting that the infrastructure is running and can automatically scale with Azure SQL Managed Instance helps me sleep better at night because this is so important to the community.”

Mosaic provides optional comment cards after all of its vaccination appointments, and it saw repeated thank-you’s for providing fast and accessible vaccinations. “We’ve never had comment cards with such high satisfaction,” says Joey Austin, Public Information Officer at Mosaic Life Care. “None of us have been through a pandemic, and to see the vaccine helping curb it and how our team was able to respond to bring that to the community was just amazing.”

The team is proud of its work, not only with staff at Mosaic Life Care and collaborators at Microsoft, but with the community efforts from cities, counties, partners, and other regional medical centers. To date, Mosaic quickly administered more than 60,000 doses, and it reopened its vaccinations sites for booster shots at the end of 2021. Concludes Austin, “When we see patients at the vaccination sites hugging loved ones and the joy on their faces, it takes what we’re doing to a whole other level. All the technology work with Azure means that people get to live their lives again. Administering doses is incredibly rewarding and supports exactly why we’re here: to serve the needs of patients.”

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