Rx.Health supports 6 million patient encounters with Microsoft security, analytics, and automation

Rx.Health develops digital navigation pathways to uplift quality healthcare through information technology. Its cloud-based platform enables clinicians to connect with patients for education and remote monitoring, and its mobile first clinical care coordination helps patients through a variety of care journeys.

Over the past several months, Rx.Health has deepened its collaboration with Yale New Haven Health to create a communication platform that offers patients a one-stop solution that facilitates dialogues with multiple providers. The solution includes appointment scheduling and rescheduling capabilities that are as simple and effortless as subscribing to an online service or ordering groceries online. It’s part of a unified digital care pathway that amplifies convenience, content, and privacy throughout the care journey, and it’s transforming the way patients and clinicians interact. Rx.Health developers use an array of Microsoft Security solutions to protect patient privacy, meet compliance regulations, scale to enormous volumes, and innovate to keep pace with evolving needs in the healthcare industry.

Blending two visions for patient-first wins

Yale New Haven Health (YNHH), a leading national academic healthcare system in Connecticut, has relied on a mix of platforms and applications to keep patients informed. This includes integration with electronic medical records (EMRs) to align with the workflows that physicians are already accustomed to when helping patients take ownership of tracking and reporting their progress. Kunjan Divatia, Executive Director of Business Applications at Yale New Haven Health, has tailored a vision that incorporates technology and the human touch into a well-coordinated patient communication system on a single platform. “It’s remarkable how often healthcare systems need to reach out to patients,” he says. “But patients and providers need sensitivity and convenience in that communication.” The care teams that now communicate with about 6 million patients a year all seem to agree.

Sensitivity equals a balance of empathy and accuracy for both patients and care teams. “Our clients worry about nurse and physician burnout, which leads to staff shortages,” says Richard Strobridge, Chief Executive Officer at Rx.Health. For example, a cardiothoracic surgeon was worn down from having to spend valuable time giving repetitive care instructions instead of discussing deeper issues with patients. “A unified communication platform can automate these routine reminders and care prompts so that the care team can focus on the things that drew them to healthcare in the first place: healing with a human touch and empathy,” adds Strobridge.

Rx.Health innovation and the vision at YNHH have converged in a major patient communication service that went live in April 2022—the first step in a partnership that frees YNHH from taking on a heavy IT lift. The system is geared to handle at least 55 million messages a year. “We look for partners like Rx.Health who can take care of infrastructure concerns for us,” says Divatia. He mentions a long list of departments in the YNHH health system that are eager to use the Rx.Health platform to effectively engage at critical times, such as announcing clinic closures during weather emergencies or sending procedure reminders, preparation instructions, or lab results to individual patients.

Meeting patient needs with data-driven key insights

YNHH’s previous appointment scheduling system didn’t provide the analytics that the Rx.Health system has. The new platform routes its patient education system and MyChart messaging from the Epic EMR system through the Rx.Health portal, which delivers dashboards and visualization through Power BI, enabling the team to generate deeper insights. “Yale New Haven Health System gains more than analytics,” adds Saurabh Gupta, Director of Engineering and Technology at Rx.Health. “We use Azure technologies and machine learning to unlock advanced insights that optimize communication with patients so we can understand if the level of communication is working for that patient. Are they receiving too many messages? Has the care plan changed? Those answers help us focus on what’s important.”

The Power BI dashboard also helps guide strategic decisions. “We use these tools to work collaboratively,” adds Gupta. “We can discuss specific metrics, like ROI, and how we can improve them.”

Innovating with productivity-boosting building blocks

With limited time, Rx.Health’s teams need to focus on innovating, not building comprehensive security platforms that already exist—like Azure Active Directory. “We rely on Azure Active Directory, a highly secure, mature, HIPAA-compliant identity management service,” he says. “It meets all encryption protocols, which keeps our teams agile and productive.” 

Rx.Health manages the full development life cycle, from build to scalable deployment, with Azure Functions, a serverless compute platform that Gupta refers to as the basic building blocks for application development. It adds Azure Logic Apps, a platform as a service enabler, to deploy and run the logic apps that automate the workflows underlying the solution and to scale the application for a rapidly growing user base. The team uses Azure Service Bus to coordinate messaging between services and applications, maintaining availability even for asynchronous components. “Our Azure infrastructure is performing around 100 million API interactions per month, and that number will only grow,” says Gupta.

Injecting security at every level

Rx.Health lives by its commitment to data security. “Patient privacy and cybersecurity are in our DNA,” says Gupta. “We live and breathe healthcare compliance standards.” He lists some highlights: protected health information, a key HIPAA provision, and personally identifiable information.

The Rx.Health development team regards Azure Front Door, a cloud content delivery network service, as the front door of its API gateway. “We immediately get a range of features, like prevention against attacks,” explains Gupta. The Rx.Health platform’s need for high availability naturally has the team on guard against attacks that cause service interruptions, such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which it now mitigates with Azure DDoS Protection. “Because we can create multiple instances in different geographical zones through one single point of entry, we can deliver a single domain for our customer through a distributed platform,” he adds. “We get a lot of security best practices, like Azure DDoS Protection. Like our other Azure solutions, it takes care of the basics for us.” The team also uses Azure Web Application Firewall as a middleware layer that provides role-based access control.

Closing the loop with Microsoft 365

If Azure services are the building blocks for Rx.Health solutions, Microsoft 365 is the mortar. The team uses components like Microsoft Teams for collaborating and connecting some of the services it uses to deliver its platform. That approach helps prevent resource leakage and maximizes efficiency for the team, which doesn’t need to switch between platforms. “We’re only beginning to dip our toes into the possibilities that Microsoft 365, especially Microsoft Teams, offers for connectivity to our data from our Epic EMR and other systems,” says Bryan Cofrin, Executive Director of Unified Communications at Yale New Haven Health. “Rx.Health is already building on that future vision.”

As a longtime Microsoft Defender customer, YNHH values that endpoint detection and response approach, which is critical to a healthcare company that needs to focus on care, not IT. And with a tight labor market, efficiency is ever more critical. The company accelerates productivity with Microsoft Defender, using it to monitor both databases and applications. “Defender for Office 365 is the silent component that gives us peace of mind,” says Gupta. Adds Christopher Parchinski, Security Architecture Manager at Yale New Haven Health, “We don’t have to manually monitor our Microsoft 365 environment because Defender for Office 365 notifies us of vulnerabilities. Given our small team, that helps us be more efficient and manage risk at the endpoint where we run Microsoft Teams.”

Dispensing that ounce of prevention

For YNHH and Rx.Health, patients do best with preventative care. Rx.Health helps YNHH provide seamless mobile connections to patients, prompting them with text reminders to make their appointments. Even in acute care settings, families can receive reassuring messages from the Epic system via the Rx.Health platform about a loved one who is undergoing surgery or other procedures. “Whether receiving updates about a spouse in surgery or an inpatient encounter, constant HIPAA-compliant status updates from the Epic system are deliverable through the Rx.Health platform, supported by Azure technologies,” says Divatia.

A key customer differentiator is Rx.Health’s content library of more than 250 automated communication pathways for inpatient, outpatient, and home health encounters that expand convenience for patients. The creative, adept use of technology is the power behind the surge of transformative ideas. “Partners like Yale New Haven Health expect us to fully handle the technology risks associated with groundbreaking new healthcare solutions,” concludes Strobridge. “We selected Microsoft as our solution provider because of its trusted applications that support our innovation.”

Find out more about Rx.Health on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.