Electronic Caregiver

Electronic Caregiver ("ECG") provides healthcare technology and services for patients. It offers medical devices, such as glucometers, and electronic services, such as a virtual caregiver, for personal care, caregiver relief, patient monitoring, and more.

ECG uses Airplane Tasks and Views for its most critical operations, such as managing patients, tracking orders, and monitoring patient activity.

Managing internal workflows became challenging

ECG has several engineering teams that are responsible for building and managing critical internal operations. These operations include updating patient information, updating order information, analyzing patient activity, and more.

Initially, ECG's engineers spent significant amounts of time maintaining these operations to keep their patient data up-to-date. ECG obtained their data through various data sources and managing this data was extremely difficult to do. Engineers had to navigate multiple applications and write one-off, local scripts to run patient data reports. Monitoring patient data trends also proved to be difficult without a centralized view of all of their data.

As maintaining these internal operations and managing their data continued to be challenging, ECG looked to utilize an external platform to ease the burden of their internal processes. ECG quickly found Airplane and decided to try it out.

A powerful developer experience using Airplane

ECG started using Airplane by building a few tasks, such as fetching user information. Immediately, the team started taking advantage of all of Airplane's developer-centric features; they were able to build and customize powerful workflows using code. The Airplane CLI was also easy to use and creating operations in Airplane aligned with what ECG's engineers were used to. Airplane helped ECG in many ways:

• Made it easy for ECG to set granular permissions for their sensitive operations, ensuring these workflows were secure.
• Inline configuration capabilities were similar to what ECG's developers were used to. This made it easy for ECG to configure tasks in Airplane using code.
• Offered powerful task orchestration capabilities. ECG could build multi-step workflows by calling existing tasks, eliminating the need to rewrite code.
• Supported long-running tasks. ECG could run tasks for 1+ hours reliably without risk of timeouts.

Airplane's superior developer experience has helped ECG streamline a number of their operations. With Airplane, ECG's engineering teams no longer spend hours manually building and updating internal applications.

Use cases

ECG uses Airplane for several use cases:

• Creating a centralized view of patient data: ECG created an Airplane View that pulled their patient data from various databases into one centralized place. They did so by writing an Airplane script to join their various datasets using a single identifier. Building this View was easy to do using Airplane and ECG could now efficiently monitor the current state of their patients.
• Canceling unused patient services: Several of ECG's medical device products include buttons that provide patients with third-party services, such as emergency response services. Many of these services go unused but are charged to ECG, making it costly. To reduce these costs, ECG built an Airplane View to monitor and quickly remove unused services in a centralized place. This helped ECG save $700,000 per year from canceling unused services. Additionally, what would have taken four months to build in-house took only three weeks to build using Airplane.
• Updating patient settings for the ECG support team: ECG's vendors offer services to ECG's patients (e.g., emergency response services) and update patient device settings once these services are provided. Initially, the ECG support team did not have visibility into these device settings. To solve this, ECG built an Airplane View that connected to vendor data, allowing their support team to view and update patient settings easily. What would have taken eight engineers and many months to build took only three weeks using Airplane.
• Migrating 30,000 patients between two systems: ECG used Airplane to build a complex, multi-step workflow that migrated patient, device, and vitals data to their new system. With Airplane, ECG was able to include a three-second delay between each workflow step to ensure their system could handle the migration. Through Airplane's built-in audit logs and run histories, ECG could also view any errors that came up during the migration and receive automatic slack notifications of the errors.
• Executing one-off operations: ECG has been using Airplane for various one-off operations. These include things like viewing daily orders, running monthly sales reports, fetching orders by patient, and more. These operations were previously time-consuming to run and can now be executed within minutes in Airplane.

ECG executes thousands of runs per week in Airplane and uses Tasks, Views, and Schedules for their most critical business operations. ECG's engineers have saved 20+ hours per week using Airplane and can process over 10,000 records of data using a single task.

"Airplane saves us significant time and money and has helped us manage our internal processes much more efficiently than building applications in-house. We are continuing to build new Tasks and Views for our organization every week and love using Airplane to do so." - Isaiah Fielder, Senior Software Engineer at ECG.