AppDynamics’ customer Nouveal e-health has been honored as a 2021 CIO 100 Award recipient. The CIO 100 Award program is the most prestigious global award for information technology leaders, and recognizes organizations worldwide that exemplify the highest level of operational and strategic excellence in IT.
Nouveal e-health is a developer of digital solutions for patient support and monitoring. In 2020, the company created Covidom, a self-monitoring device which has been instrumental in enabling nearly one million French patients to stay in touch with medical practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Progressive technologists like Guillaume are leading their companies through the pandemic, delivering digital innovation and digital transformation, often at more than 3X the speed it would normally take. Nouveal e-health has been an AppDynamics customer since 2020 and we’re honored that the company chose to use our technology to help monitor the performance of the critical Covidom application, ensuring they could deliver a seamless experience to the people of France during the pandemic.
Earlier this week, I got a chance to chat with Guillaume to congratulate him on the newest wonderful accolade and find out more about how Nouveal e-health was able to successfully develop and launch such a unique and vital healthcare application in record time, and to understand some of the challenges his team faced along the way.
Angie Mistretta: The pandemic forced businesses and organizations across all industries to completely pivot their priorities and approach to work. Can you share a little about how Nouveal e-health changed course to meet the needs of this moment?
Guillaume Fayolle: When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, France was one of the most significantly impacted countries in Europe. The country needed a solution to quickly free up healthcare organizations from patients with symptoms not needing to be hospitalized, so they could focus resources on people with severe ailments. Recognizing this immediate and urgent need, we started a partnership with Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris; a collection of 100,000 professionals, 39 hospitals and six university hospital groups; to create Covidom, a COVID-19 contact tracing application. With this medical follow-up technology, healthcare organizations were able to use the application to manage patient flow from the pandemic, while avoiding the crisis of a shortage of hospital beds. Healthcare providers were also able to provide medical support and advice to patients using the application. Without a digital solution, hospitals would have been in real danger of overcrowding, and I am proud that we were able to spot the urgent opportunity to address this challenge through technical innovation.
Angie Mistretta: What was the biggest challenge in getting the Covidom application up and running in such a short period of time?
Guillaume Fayolle: The biggest challenge in creating an application at warp speed was making sure it’s reliable. Particularly for an application like this – the French population was relying on it for their health and wellbeing. We had to ensure a seamless digital experience – for example, ensuring it wouldn’t crash due to surging usage – and that it could be a trustworthy solution for the hospitals and front line medical workers in France. Creating this application was both a technical and time-sensitive challenge because it had to be deployed fast to assist thousands of patients. Using AppDynamics’ application performance monitoring (APM) technology gave us the peace of mind we needed and helped support us as we innovated quickly. It allowed us to monitor the health of the application in real-time and quickly solve any performance issues before an interruption to service ever reached the user.
Angie Mistretta: Can you tell us more about the Nouveal e-health team and how you put the Covidom application into action once it was created?
Guillaume Fayolle: Our team is amazing – they have been working at 200-300 percent because they want to help improve the quality of life for patients and healthcare professionals, many of which have been facing these health crisis challenges since the pandemic began. The Covidom application is unique in itself, but it also uses a unique national call center of medical professionals who supervise the medical alerts that are generated daily by patients completing questionnaires while quarantined at home. The medical advice provided by the call center allows hospital medical staff to focus care on patients with severe ailments. The French Ministry of Health looks out for the health and safety of its citizens and Covidom’s technology has played a critical role in helping France monitor the pandemic through the use of modern technology.
Angie Mistretta: You have hit some big milestones. What are the most meaningful to you and your team?
Guillaume Fayolle: By using the AppDynamics APM platform, we were able to scale and monitor the performance of the application and reduce average response times from 1,500 milliseconds to 110 milliseconds, which is more than 90 percent more efficient. Additionally, Nouveal e-health has been able to go from serving 20,000 patients a year to that same number of patients in just two hours during the pandemic. This meant that those who have been suspected to have or diagnosed with COVID-19 received fast access to medical support, with doctors able to monitor them remotely from early on in the pandemic, and the application has coped exceptionally well with the high influx of usage. February 2021, the Covidom application had supported 1,050,000 patients, with 3.2 million questionnaires completed, enabling patients to manage the virus themselves with the help of medical professionals when needed, and reduce strain on French hospitals. In total, we have enrolled 24,000 doctors and 216 healthcare organizations.
Angie Mistretta: Big congratulations on everything you’ve been able to accomplish, including your CIO 100 award win. What does this recognition mean to you and the rest of the company?
Guillaume Fayolle: Under normal circumstances, anything less than a flawless digital experience is considered a disruption to consumers and the business. In the case of keeping our COVID-19 remote medical monitoring application up and running, it has been a matter of life or death. This project is a prime example of how – with the right support and tools – and with a focus on delivering a seamless digital experience for users – technology innovators can solve real problems and make a huge difference.
The road ahead
I, along with the rest of AppDynamics, feel privileged and honored to see elite technologists change the world by innovating and digitally transforming their businesses. Everyone at AppDynamics has been watching Guillaume and the Nouveal e-health team rise to the occasion and we know they will continue to break barriers within the healthcare industry for years to come. We can’t wait to see it.
For more about Nouveal e-health and Covidom, check out this video and case study. For more about APM, please listen to this webinar or request a demo here.