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Description

Accelerate your vaccine management solution with security and reliability. In this demo, you'll see how MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform can efficiently manage scheduling, patient notifications, and CDC reporting capabilities.

(00:00:00)
(bright upbeat music)

Noor Ahmad (00:00)
Hello everyone, my name is Noor Ahmad, and I am one of the Solution Engineers here at MuleSoft,part of the Public Sector team.

Noor Ahmad (00:14)
And today, we're gonna be talking about how vaccine management can be simplified using MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform.

Noor Ahmad (00:21)
The specific use case we'll be discussing is vaccine scheduling, notification, and updates to the CDC.

Noor Ahmad (00:30)
So today, we're gonna look at NTO County Health, a fictional public health department serving more than 8 million residents, that needs to simplify a process for scheduling vaccinations and notifying their patients, along with sending updates to the CDC regarding these vaccinations.

Noor Ahmad (00:48)
Vaccine scheduling is a complex process that traditionally requires health care providers to interact with many different local, state and national systems.

Noor Ahmad (00:57)
The functioning of this system is crucial in providing healthcare to our citizens. And as we see today with COVID, the importance of being able to schedule and have a record of your vaccinations is paramount to the health and safety of ourselves, our families and our friends.
Thus, we have to ensure the system firstly works. And two, is easy and quick to stand up and maintain.

Noor Ahmad (01:21)
So now let's see how quickly we can build such a system using MuleSoft and the Anypoint Platform.

Noor Ahmad (01:27)
So let's start here with the end solution in mind. Here, I take on the persona of John. John is an employee at NTO County Health, and he wants to schedule a vaccination for a new patient.

Noor Ahmad (01:39)
So I'll go ahead and share my screen here. And what we're looking at right now is the vaccine administration system created by NTO County Health. So John logs in, he gets a new patient and he fills out all of their details.

Noor Ahmad (01:53)
So he's filled out their name, James, their last name, address, and any pre-existing conditions.
And now he goes ahead and hits Submit. Doing so, John has now just scheduled the vaccination for James.

Noor Ahmad (02:08)
So now I'll go over to James's phone, and I see I've got a message from NTO County, saying, "Your appointment has been scheduled for the 3rd of March." Oh, the 10th of March, excuse me. So now on the 10th, James shows up at the vaccination site, John administers the vaccine. And now he updates James' status, to be Vaccinated.

Noor Ahmad (02:34)
This process in the background involves many different systems. NTO County wants to actually
notify the CDC, right. Because that's part of the requirements when we're talking about vaccine management. As well as send James a QR code, which is a health pass, allowing him to now go about his daily life. Whether it be getting on a bus or getting on flights, knowing and having
the comfort that he's been vaccinated.

Noor Ahmad (02:57)
So let's take a first look at CDC notification step. Sending messages to the CDC requires
sending them in HL7 format. Which is oftentimes a difficult format to understand and send messages in. And we'll see how MuleSoft really simplifies that process. But here, let's just see if James's message has been sent to the CDC.

Noor Ahmad (03:21)
So I'll look here for James, and I see that that message has been sent in this HL7 format to the CDC. Now let's go over to James's phone, and here I see I've gotten another message from NTO County, with his QR code that allows him to have a proof of vaccination and use as a health pass, as he goes about his life. So now we see James has gotten vaccinated and John was able to do all of that in a simple manner.

Noor Ahmad (03:56,)
In the backend, as we said, the vaccinations aren't only for the clinics. This data needs to be sent to various state, local and national health care agencies, including the Center for Disease Control. And while John doesn't know it, behind the scenes, this entire process was orchestrated using MuleSoft. So how exactly did this happen?

Noor Ahmad (04:17)
Now, let's take on the persona of Kaleb. Kaleb is the architect responsible for creating NTO Health County's vaccine administration site. Kaleb knows this is a daunting task, requiring process orchestration, converting messages to and from HL7, which is that standard data format that CDC requires for immunization records, that we mentioned earlier.

Noor Ahmad (04:55)
As well as ensuring he has an architecture that is one, secure, scalable, easy to maintain, and quick to actually implement. All of this in the context of growing
regulations and patient needs. Luckily for Kaleb, NTO is a MuleSoft customer, and Kaleb is familiar with MuleSoft's API-led approach.

Noor Ahmad (05:03)
This approach allows him to break down a massive task into small, easily consumable APIs. So let's take a look at the architecture Kaleb designs. So here we see a three-layer architecture that creates small modular pieces, allowing Kaleb to create the entire vaccine administration
solution in small bite-sized pieces.

Noor Ahmad (05:27)
This is commonly seen as being microservices, in air quotes, in that we have small services address specific problems. So when it comes to notifications, Kaleb knows he can quickly use one of the existing connectors in MuleSoft, to create an API that allows him to send notifications to his patients. Similarly, when it comes to sending data to the CDC, Kaleb can reuse existing APIs that exist within MuleSoft's Anypoint Exchange and quickly build on top of them, as part of the bigger solution.

Noor Ahmad (06:01)
So, now that Kaleb knows his architecture will allow him to quickly build the application and ensure it stays secure, he's ready to build. Kaleb is worried about the process
for sending data to the CDC, because his team is not familiar with HL7.
So Kaleb looks to see if there's anything that he can reuse, rather than having to build anew.

Noor Ahmad (06:23)
So now let's take a look at Anypoint Exchange.Anypoint Exchange is that API
marketplace, or a common analogy for it, it's kind of like an app store. Where developers can come and see all of the various connectors, templates, and accelerators to get started on their projects.

Noor Ahmad (06:42)
Kaleb discovers that MuleSoft has a provided HL7 connector, as well as an accelerator, allowing him to quickly get up and running on this HL7 task. So this connector he sees, allows him to quickly convert messages from JSON, which his team is familiar with, to HL7. And just like that, one of the hardest parts of Kaleb's overall architecture is solved. There is an existing connector that solves the problem and is able to rely on reuse.

Noor Ahmad (07:18)
So now let's see how Kaleb actually uses this connector to build the API that converts messages from JSON to HL7, in order to transport them to CDC. Kaleb has his development team load up their Anypoint Studio environment, which is our IDE or integrated development environment, and build out the flow that allows messages coming from the web applications that
are in JSON, to get converted to HL7.

Noor Ahmad (07:44)
This environment allows you to build a completely drag-and-drop integration or flow.
And in this case, we see the developer is using the HL7 connector. Just drag and dropping the operation that he needs, and he's able to build an API in a matter of a few clicks, rather than having to write complex code. Now, if the developer so chooses,he's able to deploy directly from
Studio, into our iPaaS environment.

Noor Ahmad (08:15)
Great, so now Kaleb has built the APIs needed for his web development team to finalize the vaccine scheduling application. At this point, Kaleb gets a new requirement. He needs to actually secure these APIs with client ID enforcement. Typically for many teams, this
requirement poses a serious timeline problem, and sometimes even a rewrite of the entire application. But since NTO uses MuleSoft, Kaleb is able to apply, remove and edit the security policies, independent of the implementation, and with zero downtime.

Noor Ahmad (08:52)
To do so, let's take a look at the API Manager piece of the Anypoint Platform. In the API Manager, Kaleb sees all of the different API's that he has exposed, and is able to actually apply security policies, again, in a matter of clicks rather than code. So Kaleb simply selects the policy that he wants, configures it for his specific use-case, and applies it to his running API.

Noor Ahmad (09:24)
So now in this process, Kaleb and his development team are able to quickly build each of these APIs that are part of the larger vaccine administration and vaccine management solution. A key fundamental part of this entire solution is the fact that as Kaleb and his team build out these small, easily consumable APIs, they continue to get reused, allowing other teams to build on top of them for their own solutions.

Noor Ahmad (09:54)
Because of the reuse, Kaleb was able to accomplish… An integration that would normally take
months to complete by NTO, has been completed in a matter of a few days. Not only was Kaleb able to implement quickly the APIs and integrations he needed, but he did so in a manner that produced a future-proof architecture, all while maintaining security and reliability. So here we saw, quickly, how an organization is able to use MuleSoft, the power of the Anypoint Exchange, which houses 200+ connectors, including templates and Accelerators to quickly and easily build applications and solve their business' needs.

(10:41)
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