OChK has won the Google Cloud Customer Award global competition in the healthcare and life sciences category for the COVID-19 vaccination e-Registration system developed for Centrum e‑Zdrowia (e-Health Center). The competition winners were announced at the Google Cloud Next ’21 international conference.
The jury of the competition recognized OChK engineers for their innovative approach, technical excellence and expert use of Google Cloud resources for the implementation of a complex and demanding project, which involved the development from scratch of a complete e-Registration system for COVID-19 vaccination in close cooperation with the e-Health Center.
The e-Registration system includes three applications that allow patients to register for vaccination using their Online Patient Account (pacjent.gov.pl) and mojeIKP mobile app, the National Immunization Program helpline staff to handle telephone registrations and vaccination station staff to directly manage, make and effect immunization appointments. The system enables all those who are eligible for vaccination to choose the date and location of the immunization appointment (using the geolocation service) and the vaccine manufacturer. All three applications are interconnected by a central database. The system has operated since mid-January 2021 and is being consistently developed to include new functionalities as the Polish National Immunization Program evolves, including guidelines from the Prime Minister’s Medical Council.
The project was completed in an incredibly short period of time of several weeks, which was crucial given the pandemic situation. Unlimited computing power available in the public cloud allowed to operate a scalable, flexible and fully efficient system available 24/7 that has enabled more than 32 million immunization appointments to be made so far. At its peak time, the system was used to schedule 880,000 visits per day and 122,000 in just one hour, and users looking for a free vaccination slot made 350,000 searches per hour and 950 searches per second. The solution was integrated with a number of existing public IT systems (including the e-Zdrowie System [P1] and the Vaccine Distribution System [SDS]) and designed to enable easy integration with other healthcare systems in the future.
“By the use of cloud native architecture and automation tools for the management of the application platform, the e-Registration system automatically scaled to the fluctuating demand for computing power, which required handling more than several thousand transactions per second at its peak. At the same time, the time spent on administrative tasks was minimized, and the team was able to focus on the most efficient use of the platform’s resources. From its beginning, the e-Registration system was developed using an architecture that allows for continued delivery of new functionalities, without interrupting application availability to users. The team launched new modules or modifications virtually every day, adapting the platform to new requirements or supplementing it with elements important for user comfort and performance. This would have been much more difficult without adequate cloud solutions, especially in a situation where we only had a few weeks to develop and launch the system,”
said Michał Potoczek, CEO of OChK.
