Clinicmaster is a Practice Management Software solution currently being used by over 600 Allied Health Clinics and Allied Health Professionals across Canada, the US, UK and Africa. With a new web based portal offering being rolled out to their client base, Clinicmaster required a modern host that could deliver the scalable technology and infrastructure they needed, at a reasonable price for the long-run.
We talked with Clinicmaster founder and owner Max Di Paola to learn a little more about the hybrid architecture he is using, and where Everleap fits in.
Tell us about Clinicmaster.
Clinicmaster manager is a turn-key application which is used to manage every facet of the business’ scheduling, billing, patient charts, stats, marketing, patient records, business analysis and more. The application is traditionally installed as a client/server application, where both the user interface screens and the database reside within the client’s office.
Over the past couple of years we have developed web-based solutions which interact in real-time with the application hosted on the client’s premises. We refer to these solutions as Clinicmaster Portals.
It sounds like a pretty involved solution. Could you get into the details of the technology?
The solution’s architecture consists of several technical layers. Some layers reside on the web while other layers reside locally where the core Clinicmaster product is installed.
Our architecture is known as hybrid architecture. We use the cloud and the traditional office network to deliver our solution. Some of the layers reside “local” to where the database is (typically our client’s office) and several layers reside in the cloud. This allows for mobility for certain features while not compromising performance for local application users.
The Portal user interacts with the application through a browser (native mobile apps are coming in the future). This is the user presentation layer, which is an MVC .NET application. This “first” cloud layer is running on IIS on Everleap servers.
The MVC application interacts with a second layer which we call the Web API Message Layer. This layer is also using .NET and is hosted on a separate set of servers on Everleap. We could have used the same set of servers but decided to segregate the layers on different physical devices to allow for simplified scaling of the solution.
There is a third layer which also resides in the cloud. This critical layer is responsible for connecting the web-based application with the data-store which could be anywhere in the world and often residing behind firewalls (such as on the local network within any one of our more than 600 database locations in our client’s office). This is the client messaging layer, which is run on Microsoft Azure via their Service Bus and Relay Services.
So this new solution required a shift away from traditional hosting to a more robust hosting infrastructure.
Yes, exactly. When we started the development of our Portal product offerings we needed an infrastructure that could support the many features available in Azure. Since our model uses hybrid architecture, we needed a solution like Microsoft’s Service Bus and Relay Services which are available on Azure. We developed our product using Microsoft technologies such as.NET, C# and SQL Server. Prior to hosting our solution on Everleap, the cloud portion of our portals was being hosted on Microsoft Cloud Servers using their Azure Cloud Environment.
We wanted an affordable method of having all the key server environments required for success. I needed separate dedicated servers for our development team, our quality assurance team (who would be continually doing a bunch of testing), our sales team (who would be demoing our product offering) and finally several scalable and independent production servers to accommodate the current clients and our growth. We were able to attain all of the above at a very reasonable price with Everleap.
I can’t say enough about the great service we received with onboarding. The experience was – and continues to be – extremely positive. Questions are answered quickly and expertly. Over at Microsoft we often needed a 2nd or even 3rd level support person to help with complex problems or requirements. Everleap gives off a very personal, small business feel, but the knowledge, expertise and service we received proved to me that you’re not only on par with Microsoft in terms of service, but in many ways are even better. I am truly impressed by the service we get.
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