About SAMHI:
● The State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance ensures the implementation of compulsory medical insurance, accumulating money to finance medical services as part of the package of services.● The Agency's IT department develops and supports off-the-shelf software that provides doctors with access to complete patient information, including medical records, medical history, test results, etc.● The mobile application "e-Tabib" allows online obtaining the results of laboratory tests, familiarizing with the history of applying to medical institutions, assessing the quality of the medical service received, as well as using other functions.

Industry:
public sector (public organization)

Digitalization in Azerbaijan is rapidly gaining momentum, affecting business and the public sector. The State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance (SAMHI) managed to unite public and private clinics to provide health insurance services to the population.
In this article, Ramil Mehdiyev, Head of the Department of Information Technologies and Innovations of the SAMHI, revealed challenges specialists faced during the project implementation and told how one single solution helped significantly improve the quality of service.

The State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance

The State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance is a legal entity of public law that ensures the implementation of compulsory health insurance, accumulating funds to finance medical services as part of a service package. The agency also purchases medical services and pays all necessary expenses for medical care. The State Agency on Mandatory Health Insurance was established in 2016 to implement compulsory health insurance.

Compulsory Health Insurance in Azerbaijan

From April 1, 2021, compulsory health insurance covers the country's entire population. To get medical services within the framework of compulsory health insurance, one should apply with an identity card to a state medical institution subordinate to TƏBİB (Association for the Management of Territorial Medical Units) or to research institutes under the Ministry of Health. If it is impossible to provide services in state medical institutions, a person gets a referral to contractual medical institutions. The list of contractual medical institutions can be found here.

E-services of the Agency

The IT department of the Agency develops and maintains ready-made software that provides doctors access to complete information about patients, including medical records, medical history, test results, etc.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have experienced an increase in the number of institutions connected to the IT system. There was a solid need to digitize laboratories and the process of receiving samples for research in the shortest possible time. So, we successfully implemented it and involved about 400 new points of sample collection for laboratory diagnosis of COVID-19, including hotels, schools and offices. In addition, we created an e-Tabib mobile application for Azerbaijan's citizens and foreign visitors, allowing them to use electronic services, in particular, making an appointment for COVID-testing and receiving e-test results. With the increased volume of system operation and information, the scope of delays and errors kept growing.

At this point, we realized the need to use a monitoring system that could speed up the process of finding problems with the application and determining the causes of their occurrence, including program code.

About the project

We considered several monitoring solutions. During the presentations and the pilot project, Dynatrace made the best impression and fully met our needs. Thanks to the work of the Ultra Technologies and BAKOTECH teams, we could successfully implement the product. Our specialists received the necessary support and training, and now we are successfully working in Dynatrace.
High-quality system tuning during implementation allowed us to see detailed information on each user transaction and better understand the application processes.
As we developed the organization's applications, we periodically saw delays in processing requests for individual services. However, we couldn't detect at what stage the delays were and what caused them. The Dynatrace platform helped isolate the erroneous areas and identify the problem in the speed of processing SQL queries. Solving this problem has improved the performance of the organization's applications.
Having decided to work with the innovative Dynatrace platform, we also optimized the internal process for finding problems and the mechanism for responding to them. The primary sources of the key services' health are visual panels implemented directly into the system interface, along with notifications to the corporate email. Now we are always rapidly informed about any changes in the operation of critical IT systems.
The Dynatrace platform is not only used to find problems in the production environment of applications. To accelerate the implementation of the tasks set by our management, our organization's development center modifies our application's ready-made modules, gradually updating it. Dynatrace is available to development and test teams, providing an opportunity to optimize the code of new releases.

Key points and plans for the future

If we briefly summarize the results of the Dynatrace implementation in SAMHI, we will define the following advantages of the product:
● Rapid detection and troubleshooting. Previously, fixing issues required significant time and resources. With Dynatrace, problems can be detected and fixed faster by pinpointing the exact location of the problem and notifying the appropriate department. The time spent solving problems has decreased by about 2-3 times.
● A proactive approach to troubleshooting. Earlier, the primary source of information about problems was end users, but now Dynatrace allows you to detect and fix errors before most of our users learn about them. It helps to prevent negative user experiences and improve the quality of service.
● Improved team coordination. Dynatrace doesn't need all your departments to mobilize and find the source of problems. Instead, it allows you to determine the cause of the problem and route it to the appropriate departments. It increases the efficiency and coherence of the teams.
We plan to complete projects on modifying the infrastructure and updating the code of application modules. We have very ambitious tasks ahead, so Dynatrace will assist us repeatedly.

Source: Infocity