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Shannex Announces Partnership with Canadian-based Blanc Labs to Improve Employee Experience and Resident Care

Healthcare | Healthcare | Healthtech | RPA

Shannex Announces Partnership with Canadian-based Blanc Labs to Improve Employee Experience and Resident Care

November 7, 2023
Shannex x BL x Can Health

November 7, 2023 (Halifax, NS) – Through its membership with the Coordinated Accessible National (CAN) Health Network, Shannex, a family owned and operated organization providing seniors’ care, service and accommodation, is partnering with Canadian health care technology company, Blanc Labs, to deploy automated processes to improve employee transitions and reduce demands on operational, human resources, information technology, and business system teams. Shannex will work with Blanc Labs to deploy this solution across its 47 long term care and retirement living communities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario.

Similar to many health care organizations in Canada, Shannex is experiencing an increased demand for health care workers and was in need of a solution to improve operational effectiveness to bring more employees on board in a more timely and efficient manner.

“Our team members are focused on providing care and service to residents in our communities and we’re always looking to find ways to improve the quality of our work,” said Greg Heard, Vice President, Innovation and Technology. “We are pleased to partner with Blanc Labs to deploy process automations that will improve operational efficiency, improve oversight and increase system security for employees, enabling them to have more time to spend with each resident.”

Blanc Labs’ automated solution will support an improved employee experience by helping to coordinate tasks between departments, track onboarding and offboarding activities and timelines, and manage access to necessary equipment and technology for new and existing employees.

“At Blanc Labs, we see a tremendous opportunity to improve employee experiences in health care through innovative uses of technology. It has been an absolute pleasure collaborating with the Shannex team to develop and implement a more efficient, secure and scalable approach to employee onboarding and management. We are excited about our continued partnership with Shannex and other health care organizations, focusing on delivering positive outcomes for stakeholders across the Canadian health care ecosystem,” said Rishi Khanna, Vice President, Engineering, Blanc Labs.

The project is being supported by the CAN Health Network – a federally funded national organization working to introduce more Canadian innovation into Canada’s health care system.

“The CAN Health Network is proud to support this important collaboration between Shannex and Blanc Labs. We look forward to seeing the results of the project, and the impact Blanc Labs’ solution has on patients, residents and staff across the country,” said Dr. Dante Morra, Chair, CAN Health Network.

“This announcement is great news for seniors in care and the dedicated people who work so hard to bring them the services they need,” said the Honourable Rechie Valdez, Minister of Small Business. “This partnership between Shannex and Blanc Labs is a great example of how the CAN Health Network is creating innovative solutions to strengthen our health care system while helping companies grow and create good jobs.”

-30- 

ABOUT SHANNEX

Shannex is a family owned and operated organization with a vision of Leading the Way to Better Living by providing seniors’ care, service and accommodation. Beginning in 1988 with a single nursing home, we now offer a full continuum of services for seniors through our Care at Home, Parkland Retirement Living, Faubourg du Mascaret and Shannex licensed long term care communities. Currently, we have communities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario, where approximately 5,900 employees provide care and service to more than 5,200 residents. For more information, visit www.shannex.com

 

ABOUT BLANC LABS

Blanc Labs works with organizations to deliver technology solutions that yield impactful outcomes for businesses, their customers and employees. As a UI Path implementation partner, Blanc Labs are experts at identifying and applying process improvement and using automation technologies to streamline workflows, reduce operational overhead, and scale efficiently. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Blanc Labs serves clients across the Americas through operations in Toronto, New York, Bogota, and Buenos Aires. For more information, visit www.blanclabs.com

 

ABOUT THE CAN HEALTH NETWORK

The CAN Health Network is a Canada-first approach to technology adoption. It helps break down barriers to scaling in the health care system and provides an environment for companies to scale to their full potential. Currently operating in Ontario, Western and Atlantic Canada, the CAN Health Network was recently awarded $30 million by the Government of Canada as part of Budget 2022 to expand into Quebec, the Territories and with Indigenous Communities. To learn more about the CAN Health Network, visit www.canhealthnetwork.ca

 

For media inquiries, please contact: 

 Isabelle Landry 

Senior Communications Manager 

Shannex Inc. 

E: ilandry@shannex.com  

C: 506-863-9570 

 

Natasha Zelinski 

Communications Advisor 

CAN Health Network 

E: Natasha.zelinski@thp.ca  

C: 647-984-7089 

 

Shriya Ghate 

Senior Marketing Manager 

Blanc Labs 

E: shriyag@blanclabs.com 

C: 647-676-3593 

Shannex Adopts Automation to Revolutionize its Employee Experience

GenAI on 🔥 (FHIR)

Case Studies

GenAI on 🔥 (FHIR)

We developed an advanced healthcare interoperability application using GenAI and FHIR
Case Studies

GenAI on 🔥 (FHIR)

We developed an advanced healthcare interoperability application using GenAI and FHIR

We developed an advanced healthcare interoperability application using GenAI and FHIR

Blanc Labs has spent the last five years working with healthcare companies like Reliq Health Technologies and Shannex as well as partners like Smile Digital Health and AWS, on building healthcare interoperability platforms and technologies on the latest standards such as FHIR and HL7.

Given the excitement around Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential to transform entire swaths of how we build and interact with technology, our healthcare team wanted to experiment with combining Gen AI tools with an FHIR standard to see if we could leverage it for a practical healthcare scenario.

As a result, our team developed a proof of concept that is meant to showcase the power of conversational AI tools to query an interoperable database of medical information.

For this PoC, we used OpenAI to query Health Samurai‘s FHIR platform, Aidbox.

 

 

Blanc Labs has spent the last five years working with healthcare companies like Reliq Health Technologies and Shannex as well as partners like Smile Digital Health and AWS, on building healthcare interoperability platforms and technologies on the latest standards such as FHIR and HL7.

Given the excitement around Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential to transform entire swaths of how we build and interact with technology, our healthcare team wanted to experiment with combining Gen AI tools with an FHIR standard to see if we could leverage it for a practical healthcare scenario.

As a result, our team developed a proof of concept that is meant to showcase the power of conversational AI tools to query an interoperable database of medical information.

For this PoC, we used OpenAI to query Health Samurai‘s FHIR platform, Aidbox.

 

 

Why we did it

In our opinion, providing a conversational UI/UX to the end user will dramatically enhance the healthcare practitioner’s ability to access and act upon patient data on-demand instead of being limited by traditional web UI/UX.

The goal of building this prototype is to evaluate the strengths and weakness of Generative AI technologies to convert natural language instructions to corresponding FHIR API calls.

Digital health adoption
How Blanc Labs transformed for Reliq Health Technologies
82%
of clinicians say that they do not always have a summary of the care their patients received outside of their practice setting¹
40 mins
is the additional time spent by clinicians per day searching for patient information from settings other than their clinical practice²

Source 1 and 2: Canada Health Infoway – Pan Canadian Interoperability Roadmap

Solution Approach Overview

We built a prototype that allows healthcare practitioners to access any arbitrary patient data simply by asking questions in natural language.

To develop this prototype, we leveraged OpenAI’s GPT3.5 APIs as the foundational LLM to convert natural language to a FHIR query that would be run on Health Samurai’s Aidbox FHIR platform. We fine-tuned the standard GPT3.5 LLM model using prompt-engineering techniques to better understand healthcare-based user instructions and matched it with corresponding standard FHIR APIs to retrieve the required data. The model was also fine-tuned to output the data in a non-technical, natural language format.

While it is built on Health Samurai’s Aidbox with OpenAI APIs, this application can be customized for other FHIR providers and other Gen AI APIs without making major changes to the fundamentals to the application.

Examples of questions we can ask the AI–Powered Knowledge Assistant

What is the number of patients in the system?

  1. Give me information about patient number XX*.
  2. What’s the name of patient number XXZ?
  3. Tell me about the last medical record of patient number YYT.
  4. I want to know about the conditions that patient number XYZ is presenting.

*In a real-life scenario, XX would be replaced with the patient ID

Denis Zavylov Health Samurai
Denis Zavylov Health Samurai
Denis Zavyalov
Product Manager, Health Samurai

Blanc Labs has developed an innovative Proof of Concept that leverages Generative AI and our FHIR platform, Aidbox, to enable natural language access to patient data through FHIR APIs. We believe this could have
mainstream application around healthcare data accessibility leading to enhanced patient care.

Gen AI on 🔥 Techstack

What’s next?

Our intention is to enhance the demo to support more complex queries involving more than one FHIR API call as well as supporting richer output formats like charts & tables.

We’d also like to hear from the FHIR community on their thoughts about how to take this to the next level. Please participate in the brief questionnaire below to provide you input and feedback.

What did you think of this initiative? Give us your feedback in the form below.

 

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Start your Digital Transformation

How Reliq Health Built their Remote Patient Monitoring Platform Around FHIR

Case Studies

How Reliq Health Built their Remote Patient Monitoring Platform Around FHIR

How Blanc Labs transformed for Reliq Health Technologies

With the advent of cloud and better technologies, more organizations are moving to Software-as-service (SAAS) models to simplify their delivery process. As we get access to better tools and technology, it is less complex to achieve this delivery model. In this whitepaper, we will walk through the key architectural elements/design of deploying a Clinical Data Repository (FHIR repository) on the cloud in a multi-tenant format. We will look at how to isolate tenants within an EKS cluster, automate Tenant onboarding, and support routing of Tenant workloads. While Blanc Labs used AWS EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service) for this model, it is important to note that the same principle can be applied to any Kubernetes cluster.

The piece is intended for IT architects, developers and DevOps, who have practical experience architecting in the AWS Cloud with EKS/Kubernetes.

A major Canadian healthtech company that focuses on remote patient monitoring using innovative technology, was looking for the right partner to help them build a web-based SaaS application that could capture patient monitoring data via IoT devices and manual entries and store that data in a cloud based clinical repository. Blanc Labs was able to implement this solution with the Smile Digital Health clinical data repository on AWS HIPA compliant cloud infrastructure.

The result of our solution, detailed below, led to increased adaptability to interoperability standards, as well as an increase in market reach and sales.

Challenges Around Switching to an FHIR Compliant Clinical Repository

Installation

Installation of any FHIR repository itself is not a big challenge, and in most cases, FHIR repository vendors provide detailed documentation on how to install the repository. However, the complexities begin when there is customization required based on your multitenancy need. Do you want to install one repository for all your tenants, or should each Tenant have its own repository? Another important consideration is if the vendor is charging for repository installation and does the FHIR Repository support multi-tenancy by default.

Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy brings another level of complexity to the overall architecture. How can you onboard new tenants quickly? Does your cloud provider support multi- tenancy? Will each Tenant have its own cloud service or can it be shared in a secure way to reduce the overall cost of installation, operation, and maintenance?

Upgrade

Data repository vendors keep releasing new versions of the repository. It is important to keep upgrading your FHIR repository. This can be challenging if you don’t keep your FHIR repository up to date and decide to upgrade many years later.

Scalability

Some scalability issues have been solved by Kubernetes but replicating the infrastructure in a different geographical region continues to be the most challenging task. It is also important in the healthcare domain because some countries have different jurisdiction requirements on where to keep the clinical data. In this scenario, we must replicate the same infrastructure in the same geographical locations.

Building Multi-Tenancy Architecture

To systematically tackle the above-mentioned challenges, we can take a three- step approach:

  1. Tenant Isolation Model
  2. Routing traffic to tenants
  3. Onboarding new tenants through automation

Tenant Isolation Model

There are multiple ways to solve multi-tenancy issues, each with its own pros & cons.¹

In the world of AWS EKS (Kubernetes) Tenant per namespace is a good blend of isolation and cost-efficiency. Tenant Isolation can be easily achieved through Network Policies. You can configure a Network Policy to allow traffic coming from a specific namespace only and deny all others.

The question arises, how will you place your FHIR repository? You have two options here:

  1. Deploy individual FHIR repositories for each Tenant
  2. Share the FHIR repository among all Tenants

This decision will be based on which FHIR Repository you choose and the cost efficiency you are aiming for.

Individual FHIR Repository for each Tenant

This approach gives you complete data isolation protection but comes with high operational costs. When using AWS, you end up with multiple DB instances for each FHIR repository if you decided to go with RDS (Amazon Relational Database). Along with Database and cloud services costs, there are other things you need to consider when choosing this approach. For example, how easy is installing the FHIR repository through automation scripts? Or, how much time will it take for each installation? Remember, our goal is to onboard a new Tenant quickly and automatically.

Shared FHIR Repository

Some clinical data repositories do provide multi-tenancy support but it’s important to look at it from an end-to-end context: how data will flow into the clinical repository, implications for data security, and other wrapper services or systems that will interact with clinical data.

If your FHIR repository supports multi-tenancy, then you can deploy on a shared name namespace and Tenant-specific services (wrapper services) will interact directly. In this approach, any traffic must come from Tenant wrapper services only. No direct external traffic is allowed to go to the shared repository.
The benefit of this approach is that when you bring in a new Tenant, you don’t need to install the FHIR repository from scratch. All you need is to deploy wrapper services for the new Tenant, which is comparatively easy using automation scripts.

 

Tenant isolation is not the only problem to solve in this architecture. How to route Traffic to tenants is another important question.

Routing Traffic to Tenants

The architecture diagram above illustrates how to route internet traffic to your pods. There are two approaches for routing traffic:

Routing Traffic Using Traefik Controller

Traefik is a cloud-native scalable ingress proxy. It can be used as a single point of entry to the cluster and it forwards the traffic to the corresponding backends. Here we can split the traffic based on subdomains, paths, headers and apply “middlewares” for transforming the incoming requests.

Routing Traffic Using AWS Load Balancer on EKS

AWS Load balancer is also an ingress controller. It creates corresponding AWS resources like AWS Application load balancer when you deploy this controller on your EKS cluster.²

Onboarding New Tenants Through Automation

To onboard a new Tenant successfully, you need a bunch of configuration/ resources up and running in the cloud and on your EKS cluster. Creating those configurations/resources manually takes a lot of time, and it’s nearly impossible if your sales team brings new tenants to the platform daily. Also, it adds risk to the production system, where you change configurations daily.

Hence, without automation, the effort of building the entire SAAS platform is lost.

Automation must be done in two layers:

  1. Infrastructure
  2. EKS/Kubernetes (on-boarding new tenants)

Infrastructure

The infrastructure-as-a-code concept is a lifesaver in this layer of automation. All large cloud providers support popular third-party platforms like Terraform, Ansible, chef, etc., to manage automated infrastructure. You can also achieve the same flexibility using native cloud solutions like AWS Cloud-formation or Azure Resource Manager.

Once you have scripts ready, you can easily replicate the infrastructure in different geographical locations whenever it is required. This layer helps you to achieve some degree of scalability.

In this layer, you end up creating cloud resources like VPCs, subnets, security groups, EKS, and other supporting resources like S3 (Storage), RDS, etc. Also, you need to set up some base resources on your EKS cluster like Istio, networking logging, and monitoring resources.

EKS / Kubernetes (On-boarding New Tenants)

Onboarding new tenants through a frictionless process is the key component of a multi-tenancy offering. The absence of this component defeats the purpose of SAAS offering if onboarding a Tenant takes a long time.
This process is a composite of multiple moving parts. Orchestration of these moving parts is required to get the Tenant up and running quickly. Through automation, we can achieve a low-friction process.

We can automate multiple subprocesses like creating new namespaces, configuring the Tenant Role & policies, and using Terraform, AWS CLI, and Bash Scripts. Each Tenant must access only those resources to which the Tenant is entitled. Cognito User pool, S3 buckets, SQS, DB schemas, and FHIR repository are a few examples.

Also, along with creating the above resources, scripts have to deploy wrapper & other supporting services if required.

These automation scripts give you the flexibility to build a Tenant Management app where the Tenant or Sales Team can onboard a new Tenant at the click of a button.

Key Learnings and Conclusion

At Blanc Labs we were successfully able to architect & deliver a Multi-Tenant SaaS solution to our healthcare client using the design provided in this whitepaper.

The biggest challenge we encountered in the process was the development of automation scripts whose complexity could increase considerably if not designed in the right fashion. We were able to modularize and document the scripts in a way that is easy to maintain for further enhancements. Automation scripts can also be configured in client’s CI/CD pipelines. This will allow clients to deploy new tenants and create secure & high available infrastructure with a click of a button.

Approach

Everything We Make Starts With People

http://David%20Liu

As a new immigrant to Canada, fitting into the working culture was a concern. But the trust and support from managers and colleagues erased those worries. I’ve had the privilege of establishing a new practice and managing projects.

David Liu
CoE Lead
http://Pooja_Bhandarkar

I feel at home at Blanc Labs. Here, I am encouraged to learn, grow, and pursue new levels of excellence every day. The leadership has been instrumental as they have nurtured me to rise to new heights and for that, I am grateful.

Pooja Bhandarkar
Software Engineer
http://Douglas_Palacios

The culture at Blanc Labs is built on respect, empowerment and teamwork. It is a great place to grow. You need to be a constant learner and a real team player to succeed. It’s always about helping each other to get the best possible result, not about who’s getting the credit. 

Douglas Palacios
Staff Software Architect

Blanc Labs has been so empowering for me: the learning, the certifications, the opportunity to work with clients, the teamwork – my work family, really.

Nadia Bastidas
Sr Software Developer
http://David%20Liu

As a new immigrant to Canada, fitting into the working culture was a concern. But the trust and support from managers and colleagues erased those worries. I’ve had the privilege of establishing a new practice and managing projects.

David Liu
CoE Lead
http://Pooja_Bhandarkar

I feel at home at Blanc Labs. Here, I am encouraged to learn, grow, and pursue new levels of excellence every day. The leadership has been instrumental as they have nurtured me to rise to new heights and for that, I am grateful.

Pooja Bhandarkar
Software Engineer
http://Douglas_Palacios

The culture at Blanc Labs is built on respect, empowerment and teamwork. It is a great place to grow. You need to be a constant learner and a real team player to succeed. It’s always about helping each other to get the best possible result, not about who’s getting the credit. 

Douglas Palacios
Staff Software Architect

Blanc Labs has been so empowering for me: the learning, the certifications, the opportunity to work with clients, the teamwork – my work family, really.

Nadia Bastidas
Sr Software Developer
http://David%20Liu

As a new immigrant to Canada, fitting into the working culture was a concern. But the trust and support from managers and colleagues erased those worries. I’ve had the privilege of establishing a new practice and managing projects.

David Liu
CoE Lead
http://Pooja_Bhandarkar

I feel at home at Blanc Labs. Here, I am encouraged to learn, grow, and pursue new levels of excellence every day. The leadership has been instrumental as they have nurtured me to rise to new heights and for that, I am grateful.

Pooja Bhandarkar
Software Engineer
http://Douglas_Palacios

The culture at Blanc Labs is built on respect, empowerment and teamwork. It is a great place to grow. You need to be a constant learner and a real team player to succeed. It’s always about helping each other to get the best possible result, not about who’s getting the credit. 

Douglas Palacios
Staff Software Architect

Blanc Labs has been so empowering for me: the learning, the certifications, the opportunity to work with clients, the teamwork – my work family, really.

Nadia Bastidas
Sr Software Developer

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