In the Summer of 2018, Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) released a custom Referrals Automation web application that was launched within EPIC via Smart-on-FHIR specifications and integrated with disparate systems across the enterprise and beyond, including NIH, commercial vendors and other 3rd party systems. CDHI wanted to scale the platform quickly and proactively, and needed to monitor and detect changes automatically on its dependencies of external APIs to ensure stability. A DEVOPS culture was adopted to provide development teams with a suite of tools to automate the repeatable processes of integrating their code, testing solutions, and building and deploying new versions to multiple environments. Agile methodologies were put into practice throughout the overall project ranging from partnering with another UCSF group to build the automation framework to developing detailed application functionality. The methodololgy proved itself time and time again as there were many new discoveries to be made and the incremental approach limited technical debt by not going down the wrong path.

In 2019 UCSF Health leadership embarked on a program to improve patient access as part of a Digital Patient Experience (DPE) Initiative and CDHI was tapped to lead. Additional platforms: Salesforce Heroku and HealthCloud are introduced to the overall solution and given the success of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) techniques used in Referrals Automation, CI/CD is also applied to DPE.

This session will provide a general overview of DEVOPS and its business rationale with more detail about our efforts in CI/CD and compare-contrast the processes between Referrals Automation and DPE. We’ll focus on the lessons learned in particular:

• discuss the implementation of Release Toggles to support Dark Launches,
• considerations necessitated by integrating with software tool dependencies on the local EPIC instance, AWS, Heroku, and HealthCloud
• deploying DevOps in an environment with heavy concerns about PHI and developers in multiple locations.

Slides: https://ucsf.box.com/s/m6posuts7nnt7lxk8trrbhez4erjhv2t (MyAccess login required)