When your technology supports governments’ collaboration and response in times of crisis, your solutions need to be highly available, reliable, and resilient.
Juvare, a leading provider of critical incident preparedness and response software, understands this all too well. Clients use the company’s solutions to prepare for, respond to, and recover from major incidents such as the California wildfires, Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, and multiple hurricanes. Juvare is also integral to the COVID-19 response with more than 600 emergency management agencies, 50 federal agencies, and 4,000 hospitals and public health departments currently relying on Juvare’s solutions as part of their ongoing response to the pandemic, including for mass testing and vaccination campaigns.
When a crisis occurs or there is an impending natural disaster, access to real-time data is critical for saving lives, mitigating damage, and effectively managing these events. Juvare has been able to serve government agencies by focusing on innovation, particularly through cloud adoption. Juvare, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, leverages the AWS Cloud to quickly scale and innovate, providing emergency management and public health agencies with the tools they need to do their jobs effectively when the public is depending on them most.
Confronting the challenges of on premises
Juvare, which works with state and local agencies as well as multiple federal response and defense agencies, traditionally operated some of its workloads in an on-premises environment.
Although the company met its customers’ needs with this approach, it wanted more agility and scalability.
“The biggest challenge we were facing with our on-premises environments was demand prediction,” says Bryan Kaplan, Juvare’s Chief Information Officer. “Being in the incident management business, having the ability to elastically scale our environment based on situational demand is critical. The ability for us to do that in an on-premises world was a challenge.”
“The government organizations Juvare serves are relying on them in critical situations that require low latency, high speed, high availability, and very secure communications. It’s harder to accomplish this on premises,” says Darryl Wilson, GovTech Enterprise Account Manager at AWS.
Because of this, Kaplan says Juvare knew moving to the cloud was vital for its business. Juvare wanted an affordable “best-of-breed approach,” so the company turned to AWS.
“We wanted a cloud provider who offered security, scalability, a customer focus, and a series of technologies that matched our goals,” he says. “We selected AWS for the majority of our workloads based on the combination of its technology and price.”
Making the move to the cloud with AWS
Juvare began its cloud migration in 2018, methodically exiting all the physical data centers it had been using across the country. Most of its workloads are now hosted on AWS. The move is especially beneficial for managing workloads associated with EMTrack, which is a solution that can be used to track people, patients, and populations throughout major crises.
Juvare is using many of the scalable solutions and services AWS offers, including AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Fargate, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Aurora. Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use orchestration service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. Fargate provides a serverless computing engine for managing containers, which improves security and resource optimization during the application development process. DynamoDB is a fully managed, multi-region NoSQL database that offers built-in security, backup and restore, and improved performance for scalable digital applications. Amazon Aurora is a relational database engine that combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost effectiveness of open source databases.
“One of the benefits of the move to the cloud was that we could improve that level of elasticity and provide customers with better demand response. We’re using all these services to scale our applications and enable our clients to respond to the large demand they’re seeing,” Kaplan says, referring to the pandemic.
Using AWS allows Juvare to access the storage and compute power necessary to adapt to agencies’ needs during incident responses. For example, now that COVID-19 vaccines are available, agencies can use the vaccination management capabilities within EMTrack to schedule tens of thousands of vaccination appointments. By leveraging the AWS Cloud, Juvare is “able to scale to meet demand on a consumption basis as opposed to having to deploy always-running infrastructure that is otherwise over-provisioned,” Kaplan says.
Wilson says one of the biggest advantages of this approach is Juvare can meet this increase in demand and better serve its customers more cost effectively. “Companies in the incident management space often have to pre-purchase infrastructure. You have to buy at max capacity years in advance for any potential scenario, purchasing thousands of databases just in case they might be needed during a widescale event like COVID-19 or a massive wildfire,” Wilson says. “Pre-purchasing that capacity is expensive, which means the cost often gets passed along to customers. By using the cloud, Juvare can spin resources as it needs them and quickly put this technology into the hands of state and local governments.”
Serving public health agencies in times of crisis
Juvare has longstanding relationships with multiple government agencies. Juvare’s engagement with the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Greater New York Hospital Association showcases how the company is using the AWS Cloud to benefit its government customers.
The Illinois Department of Public Health
The department uses EMTrack for its COVID-19 vaccine distribution management and has used CORES Responder Management System (RMS) since January 2014.
It uses the RMS platform for back-end administration in its efforts to recruit, register, and credential thousands of volunteers during public health incidents, including the COVID-19 pandemic. To better communicate with the state’s nearly 13 million residents and recruit health care volunteers, the department began issuing statewide wireless emergency alerts to mobile devices. Leaning on the AWS Cloud, Juvare facilitated this effort by rebuilding the front-end registration workflow for the Illinois HELPS site, the online destination for the state’s volunteer management system.
When the Illinois Emergency Management Agency issued a series of wireless emergency alerts in late March, the website was flooded with traffic. Illinois HELPS received over 120 million page requests over two days, including a spike of 50 million page requests in less than five minutes. The site was resilient and able to handle these spikes because Juvare quickly pivoted and met the state’s needs using AWS’s elastic, scalable cloud services.
The initiative in Illinois led to 30,000 new volunteer registrations, allowing the state to access additional skilled health care workers to combat the pandemic and potentially save thousands of lives.
The Greater New York Hospital Association
Juvare’s solutions also help hospitals streamline their communications during mass casualty events. Collaboration among hospitals, emergency management agencies, public health agencies, and disaster response partners is key during a crisis, but these entities often rely on antiquated systems for communication. Dealing with New York area mass casualty events usually entails an inefficient, manual process in which emergency medical services (EMS) dispatchers call various hospitals to understand their capacity for critical and non-critical patients.
The Greater New York Hospital Association is a health care advocacy organization whose membership includes more than 200 hospitals and health systems throughout the tri-state area. It leverages Juvare’s EMResource platform to power its Sit Stat System, an online tool that collects information from its members before and during emergency events.
EMResource allows the Sit Stat System to streamline communications between EMS dispatchers and hospital personnel during a mass casualty incident. Previously, a mass casualty declaration would trigger a manual process where EMS dispatchers and hospital staff in the emergency department verbally communicated with one another about the incident. Afterward, hospital staff would communicate with other stakeholders within their organization as they prepared for mass casualty victims to arrive for emergency treatment.
This manual process created too many opportunities for each of these groups to receive inaccurate information or delays in hospitals preparing to receive patients. However, with EMResource serving as a foundation for the upgraded Sit Stat System — Sit Stat 2.0 — dispatchers can easily create a mass casualty event in the system. Using recommendations from a computer-aided dispatch system, dispatchers can select which hospitals in the area should be notified about a mass casualty event. The event triggers an automatic notification to all designated hospital stakeholders. The system also places a call to a “red phone” in the emergency department and uses redial, replay, and tracking functionality to ensure hospital stakeholders received the call and all other communications. This ensures the hospital staff gets accurate information in a timely manner so they can effectively prepare to treat patients.
Since the system implementation in November 2019, New York City alone has had 447 mass casualty events. In that time, EMResource and Sit Stat 2.0 delivered 1,826 automated notifications, accounting for 1,822 calls the city’s dispatchers didn’t have to make. This demonstrates the true value of the cloud for incident and emergency management. It empowers health care providers, drives more informed decision-making, and allows them to work more efficiently at a time when life and death literally hangs in the balance.
Scaling, innovating, and making an impact
Using AWS’s secure and elastic cloud services, domain expertise, and hands-on customer focus, Juvare has been able to scale and innovate its solutions more cost effectively. With consumption-based pricing, Juvare can leverage the exact amount of compute resources it needs based on customer demand, whether an agency encounters a surge in traffic to its website during a public health crisis or needs to communicate with partners across the public and private sector during a natural disaster.
“We don’t need to be as focused on the security and management of the underlying infrastructure, since the majority of these items are handled by AWS through the shared responsibility model,” Kaplan says.
That’s because AWS has architected its solutions with built-in security and compliance in mind, Wilson says, so government technology providers and their customers can have peace of mind when it comes to abiding by state and local data residency and privacy laws.
This gives companies like Juvare more time and space to focus on innovation, which ultimately benefits government agencies. With its solid cloud foundation, Juvare is now even better positioned to provide emergency management and public health agencies with the support they need to tackle the next inevitable challenge, including coordinating vaccine inventory management and deployment.
“We don’t just focus on trying to solve problems with technology,” Wilson says. “We spend a tremendous amount of time focusing on the business impact of the decisions our government technology partners are making. We focus on outcomes, which allows us to be trusted advisors in helping GovTechs grow their business and better serve their customers.”
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