Vial

Creating Vial’s ETL platform to manage millions of healthcare records

Biotech

Healthcare

Our Impact

We partnered with Vial to create Vial Connect, a fully fledged ETL platform to help find patients for clinical trials.

Designed, architected, and built the platform to ingest millions of healthcare records
The data is transformed into meaningful structures and loaded into Vial’s systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner
Medical professionals can easily find and filter the most suitable patients for recruitment into clinical trials

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Vial is reimagining drug discovery and development in order to bring effective new therapies to market faster.

With $100M+ raised, Vial is a contract research organization (CRO) that automates clinical trials and lowers their cost through a hyper scalable model. They connect with healthcare data providers to find patients that would benefit the most from taking part in current clinical trials.

THE VISION
As a result of needing to work with large amounts of data from electronic health record (EHR) APIs, CSVs, XML files, and more, Vial approached Lazer to help design, architect, and build a greenfield solution to this.

WHY LAZER?
As a partner, Lazer doesn't just build a solution — we make sure it’s the right one for the client’s needs and their future. We worked closely with Vial to understand their needs, plan the perfect solution, and build it to scale. We are experts at meeting HIPAA compliance and work with large amounts of healthcare data.

Visit Vial

platform

Web
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Retool

Expertise

Frontend Development
Integrations
Backend Development

Stage (2022)

Series B

Investors

General Catalyst
Byers Capital
BoxGroup

Approach

Building an ETL solution for searching electronic medical records

One of Vial’s core goals is to help clinics find more patients for trials.

Typically the best way to do that is by accessing EHRs or EMRs (electronic health/medical records), searching and filtering patients by characteristics, and then reaching out to them for recruitment purposes. We knew we had to build an ETL (extract, transform, and load) platform to create a frontend solution for this process.

Approach

Mapping EHR system terminology and accessing provider APIs

One of the first EHR systems we engaged with was ModMed. However, very quickly we learned there were differences in the terminology. For example, ModMed referred to allergies and problems as intolerances and conditions in their systems.

We needed to create a plan and mapping strategy that would take all the terminology differences from EHRs and relate them to the terminology we needed.

In order to get access to EHR APIs, you often need to pass their technical evaluation to showcase that you have a thorough understanding of their systems. With ModMed, we successfully passed their evaluation and ensured that ModMed could audit our work.

Approach

Planning Vial's HIPAA compliance with Google Cloud

When dealing with any patient data, we needed to ensure we were dealing with it in a compliant manner.

Before architecting our ideal solution, we took core pieces we needed such as authentication, database access, access control, encryption, audit logs, and more, and thought through what was needed to be HIPAA compliant. By leveraging Google Cloud, we would ensure that we would enable them to be fully compliant when using the solution.

Approach

Building a complete architecture on GCP

In order to create a scalable, reliable ETL platform, we harnessed Google Cloud extensively.

Google Cloud services we used included Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Logging, Identity and Access Management, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Looker for GCP, and Firebase. Outside of GCP, we used Github Actions for our test suite and deployment.

Approach

Processing records with a large-scale caching strategy

Once our architecture was created, we needed to create the pipeline to ingest, transform, and load the hundreds of thousands of medical data we needed to deal with.

Very quickly, we learned that rate-limiting would be an issue, so we developed a caching strategy at every step of the ingestion process.

Approach

Scaling our solution to millions of healthcare records

Creating a reliable ETL pipeline was our first goal.

Afterward, we performed optimizations to ensure that it could support millions of medical records and more EHR systems in the future. To create a quick and optimal frontend to access the data, we leveraged Retool to query the appropriate databases and filter through data.

Conclusion

Working with the Vial team was incredible, and working on a project with such a great mission was the cherry on top.

At the end of the engagement, we successfully created and launched Vial Connect. It came with search and filtering, integration with two ModMed clinics, the integration with EHRs, CSV downloads, secure storage of millions of patient records, and a successful plan for the future. We’re excited to see Vial continue to grow!

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