In a world where pretty much everything functions online, it’s surprising to find industries that still rely on paper for daily operations. This is the case for a small piece in the healthcare industry. Over 80% of the operations involved with managing and scheduling non-emergency medical transportation is done via phone or fax. These efforts are notoriously inefficient and error prone, and put patient information at risk.
Movi Healthcare is revolutionizing the way communications are done in this space. As a digital application used by nursing homes and hospitals, Movi streamlines the process from end-to-end. Giving both care and transportation providers real-time visibility into patient discharge information, ride cancellations, and more, Movi significantly improves the experience for everyone involved.
This model presents both complex software infrastructure needs and healthcare industry requirements. These challenges can be hard to overcome for technical teams with limited budgets — which is the reality for most in the early stages.
David Dabney is the CTO at Movi Healthcare and is responsible for managing a small, in-house engineering team. He’s been on the team since the first days of product development and has seen the Movi team and healthcare space evolve through COVID and beyond. Through it all, the one constant he could rely on was Aptible.
“I don’t know what life at Movi is like without Aptible - and I don’t think that I want to.”
The Challenge
“It’s a no-brainer to at least give Aptible a shot.”
When Movi was striving to prove an MVP that fit in the market, the engineering team was a one-man shop of Dabney himself. Without a team of experienced developers, they were forced to outsource tasks to get the product to an MVP state.
While Dabney was comfortable trusting some tasks to an outsourced team, the same couldn’t be said for platform infrastructure. Movi wasn’t in a position to build something from scratch from both a budgetary and resource perspective. Dabney knew he needed a solution that was already on the market.
Aptible played a critical role in enabling the flexibility and agility Dabney and Movi needed in the early stages of product development and adoption.
Like other startups in the healthcare space, Dabney also had to worry about HIPAA compliance. Regulations are known for slowing down development, not expediting it, and Movi was in a stage where moving at a pace other than full speed ahead just wasn’t possible.
“Even for teams with an unlimited budget, it would be silly to reinvent the wheel. Just go with Aptible and save yourself the headache and expenses.”
The Solution
“One of the best decisions we made in the early days was using Aptible for application deployments.”
Aptible stood out first and foremost for supporting Movi’s HIPAA compliance requirements. “That really made it a no brainer.” Aptible makes it extremely easy to test before committing to the tool. The setup process is intuitive for ease of use and adoption, and extensive resources help new users explore the tool and understand its capabilities.
As the product has evolved, Dabney and his team have completely rearchitected the application. They never had to worry about DevOps or infrastructure along the way, freeing up resources for creating and iterating on new features.
“With Aptible, the infrastructure never fails,” reports Dabney. “And if we ever see weird behavior, Aptible steps in to mitigate impacting factors and reference environment variables.” In these cases, Dabney can essentially just hand off the problem and move on with confidence. Dabney recalls only experiencing one issue in the seven years Movi has partnered with Aptible, and it was resolved swiftly without repercussions.
Thanks to Aptible, David and his team have never had to deal with clusters as part of the deployment process. It’s as simple as knowing how to push changes to a Git repository. This allows them to operate with less-technical developers when it comes to backend knowledge and prioritize front end skills to improve the product.
Even to this day, Movi has never hired a dedicated DevOps team. Dabney and the other engineers still don’t have to worry about automatic backups, vulnerabilities, or anything related to infrastructure or DevOps. “It’s made the investment into Aptible extremely justifiable.”
Movi can lean on Aptible for meeting healthcare security standards. “Aptible gets you a lot of street credit with healthcare organizations,” explains Dabney. “It’s overwhelming when they’re asking all of these security-related questions. As long as we’re under the Aptible umbrella, we can be confident in our responses.”
Sharing reports with prospective clients is convenient to prove security controls and protective measures. This would be nearly impossible to accomplish without a team of dedicated DevOps engineers managing the Movi environment. But Aptible makes it all possible.
“Because of the confidence Aptible gives us, we’re never scared to do a deployment, even in the middle of our highest usage times.”
The Results
“99% of the time, we’re focused on solving a business problem and not a deployment issue.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Movi was set-up to play a part in solving some of the complex challenges introduced in their industry. Healthcare suffered some of the worst staff shortages while having the greatest need. At the same time, large cars and vans were in short supply across the country. This presented significant hurdles for nursing homes and hospitals that were desperately trying to control costs while still giving their patients top-notch care.
Movi empowered care providers to control their own destiny, at least in regards to non-emergency transportation, at a time when everything else felt completely unknown. Features were introduced to allow nursing homes to control fleet management and share transportation resources between properties in the same region.
Because of Aptible, Movi has evolved to become a mature product capable of solving serious gaps in patient care. Because they had such high confidence in Aptible’s infrastructure and security capabilities, Dabney and the other engineers could focus on iterating and improving the app, and ideating and implementing new features.
“When we come up with a new idea, we can just lean on the Aptible infrastructure to see how we can use the tool to accomplish whatever we’re trying to achieve,” says Dabney. He estimates that 99% of their engineers' time is spent on solving business problems, not worrying about deployment or DevOps tasks.
Moving forward, Movi has their sights set high. This could be a very big year for them, and Dabney has no concerns about being ill prepared for scale. “The way we’ve architected the app married with how easy Aptible makes deployment means we have no concerns about future scaling.”
Aptible has helped lay the groundwork that made it possible for Movi to become the application it is today. Dabney has dreams of evolving to become vital to users’ day-to-day, or even hour-to-hour, operations. They want to transform the market and patient outcomes at the same time.
“Aptible is something we never have to think about. And that’s great.”
