Selfhelp delivers better health outcomes and reduces isolation for seniors with Azure Cloud Services

To say that Selfhelp Community Services is a titan among nonprofit human services agencies doesn’t do it justice. Selfhelp was founded in 1936 with the goal of helping people who were fleeing Nazi Germany build fruitful new lives in the United States. Today, Selfhelp has evolved into a multipronged social services powerhouse, managing senior centers, operating affordable apartment buildings with onsite senior services, and employing 1,500 home health care workers. The organization’s goals have expanded to include helping all older adults live with dignity and independence. Selfhelp’s clients now come from all over the world, and it remains the largest provider of comprehensive services to Holocaust survivors in North America.

Virtual help for seniors and the homebound

Using seed funding from Microsoft about 12 years ago, Selfhelp began building a forward-thinking online learning platform called the Virtual Senior Center (VSC), which recently rebranded to enliveo. Primarily operated internally for members of its centers, enliveo was a way for older and homebound adults who were no longer able to access in-person programs to stay connected with their communities. Over time, enliveo evolved into a vital platform offering a broad range of interactive programs, access to cultural experiences, and discussion groups and chats.

At the end of 2019, Selfhelp prepared to relaunch and upgrade the platform using Azure Cloud Services to move it fully into the Microsoft Cloud, dramatically expanding its range of capabilities. At that time, the enliveo team had no idea they were going be building and scaling a new platform under unprecedented conditions—a global pandemic.

COVID-19 sparks unprecedented innovation

The rapid societal changes during the initial phase of COVID-19 underscored the wisdom of Selfhelp’s concept and prompted the accelerated evolution of its enliveo platform. “So many people went from being active and able to do things in person to suddenly being homebound,” says Russell Lusak, Selfhelp Community Services Chief Operating Officer. “For our enliveo members, nothing changed in terms of their access to services.”

Selfhelp started fielding inquiries for assistance from the New York City Department for the Aging and the State of New York, among others, highlighting an opportunity for broad-minded, innovative thinking. “With the pandemic came the need to make enliveo available to other organizations that were planning to create hybrid programming,” says Lusak. “We’ve expanded our offering in the last couple of years, and today, it appeals to many different types of organizations—not just those that service an older adult population.”

The enliveo platform turns to Azure for a new era

In its first decade, the VSC system ran on-premises applications in a traditional client/server model. Transitioning to a new era and planning for future growth, enliveo architect Michael Quallet liberally used a wide range of Azure services. “The project to update and relaunch the VSC as enliveo was initiated on Azure from the beginning, using Azure DevOps to host our source code and then using Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure SQL Database to deploy the platform,” explains Quallet. “The core application is built using a hybrid approach and deployed as microservices, so we’re able to scale the workload as needed.” Secondary applications include Linux-based D-series Azure virtual machines (VMs) to run video and chat services. “We considered other cloud platforms, but Azure presented the most seamless path and had the most relevant services that we needed,” he says.

Quallet turned to Azure Blob Storage for data that’s accessed frequently and Azure Disk Storage, including Azure Premium SSD for high performance on VMs and Azure Standard SSD for high availability on Kubernetes clusters. To help keep everything running smoothly, enliveo relies on Azure Monitor as its primary monitoring system for insights, dashboards, and alert features.

Scaling up programs and changing lives

The number of live programs that enliveo hosts has grown to more than 7,000 a year, and that level of scale and growth has presented no problems. “Simplifying the complexities of the various services and our ability to quickly scale and support tens of thousands of users on demand was the primary value proposition that the Azure platform offered us,” says Lusak. “We can integrate new partner services, scale to accommodate any growth, and still simplify basic administrative tasks that would have been difficult before. And with Azure, we haven’t had any downtime in 18 months.”

Lusak sums up the human impact of the Azure migration: “Every member who benefits from enliveo is a member of our extended family. We’re in this to change lives and alter health outcomes for people in a manner that wasn’t previously possible at scale.”

An adaptable, dynamic platform for growth and expansion

The last few years of growth have validated enliveo’s update plans. It’s now a complete platform as a service (PaaS) offering and easily adapts to work with non-Microsoft services and apps. Selfhelp is marketing the platform to other organizations to adopt and customize for their own needs and is looking to continued expansion. Quallet says, “Our customer base has grown many times over, but we have even more aggressive growth plans that are possible with the scalability of the Azure platform.” The landscape has changed since the pandemic began. As enliveo Business Development Manager Ana Semedo adds, “It’s not just the market tolerance, but the market need. Everyone is now planning for a hybrid world. A platform like ours is baked into the long-term business plans of all kinds of organizations.”

The enliveo team is using Azure to seamlessly create different tiers of membership, such as an exclusive community for comprehensive in-house content, and there’s a completely private “white label” community where the customer organization controls exclusive access to its own content. The platform is also offered as a hybrid version of the two, where the user organization has access to enliveo content but can also mix in its own private content. “What was once an internal, private service for a nonprofit has now been operationalized and transformed into a commercial service for the public and the market at large,” says Lusak of enliveo’s Azure-enabled evolution.

Meeting the needs of all types of users and creating meaningful connections

A key benefit for the team that its Azure capabilities make possible is the sophisticated segmentation that’s now achievable for enliveo’s many user groups—it now enables community groups to create specialty subgroups. Examples include an LGBTQ subset of a community or a Holocaust survivor group, which can have specific content that’s only applicable to those groups. Community administrators can then manage who can access those subgroups. As Lusak explains, “Some of these topics can be very sensitive, and you want to take special care, providing them a group that’s highly safe, secure, and private while still being able to offer the other general programs what they want. That’s another key difference that Azure and the Microsoft Cloud made possible. We couldn’t have done it in the old environment.”

Adds Semedo, “The platform does so much, but for the participant, what ultimately matters is that it’s making their day meaningful.” Quallet sums up enliveo’s impact: “The effect that this service has on our members is the most meaningful thing I’ve done in my career. For many, this is the difference between stagnation and sorrow or joy and social engagement, and in some cases, life and death itself.”

Find out more about Selfhelp Community Services on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and learn more about enliveo on LinkedIn.