Cepheid

Cepheid is a global molecular diagnostics company with a broad test portfolio that includes, among others, tests for respiratory infections, blood virology, and women’s and sexual health.

Country:
United States
Industry:
HealthTech
Technologies:
Java Spring Boot, AWS EC2, AWS RDS, MySQL/Amazon Aurora, AWS S3, RabbitMQ
Cepheid

For a period of 7 months we've had the opportunity and pleasure to work for one of the leading American molecular diagnostics companies.

Cepheid’s GeneXpert systems and Xpert tests automate complex and time-consuming manual procedures, providing a better way for various institutions around the world to perform world-class PCR testing. During the Covid pandemic, the demand for Cepheid's services has increased significantly and the subsequent increase in amount of medical data collected by the company and used by 3rd parties has required changes in data management (including new system for sharing medical data).

Task

Due to all the challenges related to the pandemic situation (especially high demand/volume for Covid-19 diagnostics and its data management) the company had to increase the speed of development of the main system managing all the diagnostic data. On top of that the company had to create a new version of Data Exporter, which gives access to selected sensitive medical data to authorised 3rd party partners in a highly secure way.

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Solution

As the company has already had the entire department engaged in the development of the main data management system system it has decided to hire a new small team (2 backend engineers, 1 tester & 1 security specialist) to prepare the new version of Data Exporter.  The first step was to onboard the entire team and get familiar with all the corporate procedures and coding standards. On the foundation of applied procedures we could create our own agile development environment as a set of our own routines.

Our development phase started from using the previous version of the Data Exporter and removing from it the code which was unnecessary from the new version’s point of view. Then we’ve upgraded all the libraries and refactored an existing code structure to better serve the new code requirements. After the basic code preparations we were ready to implement new Data Exporter features. Besides standard encryption libraries the new version security was based on the data access management provided by AWS platform. Obviously the implementation was also extensively tested through different edge cases and data loads.

After the successful implementation our team was incorporated into the core department responsible for developing the main data management system to increase the velocity of building the new features there.

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Results & Benefits for the Client

Thanks to good code preparation before implementing new features the team has finished creating a new version of the Data Exporter more than 2 months before the originally planned deadline. The remaining time was devoted to enforcing the core development department in the final phase of their projects. 

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Benefits for our Team

We’ve acquired a lot of knowledge related to security as we hadn’t had the pleasure to work with medical data before. Due to the sensitive nature of the medical data, the security aspect is similarly or even more important than the financial data in banking systems.

We’ve also improved our software development skills due to high-quality coding standards imposed by corporate quality-assurance procedures.

We’ve also had the pleasure to work in a multicultural environment.  Data Exporter team (4 people in total) consisted of 4 nationalities from 3 continents speaking 10 different languages in total.

Codepole helped with the launch of our current platform. Implemented features and products enabled us to rapidly scale our existing Swedish business and expand to new markets.

Robin Tjassens, Kompar

Codepole managed to provide me with top quality candidates in short period of time. Their support and hands-on approach throughout the recruitment process were invaluable.
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Daniel Abebe, HuggyStudio