- Angular
- Azure
- Engineer Autoscaling
- FinTech
iVitaFi
Launching a stalled healthcare financing disruptor with a cloud-based, mobile-first approach
The Challenge
iVitaFi partners with hospitals and banks to offer instant, zero-percent interest lines of credit and easy payment plans to cover patient medical bills. After contracting a large development company to build the cloud-based app that hospitals and patients would use to apply for iVitaFi’s lines of credit, iVitaFi was left with a fundamentally flawed code base incapable of supporting iVitaFi’s vision and mission. In an audit of the app, 7Factor uncovered widespread architectural issues, troubling security vulnerabilities, and an unreliable manual build and deployment process. To secure their next round of funding, iVitaFi needed a working MVP—and fast.
Our Solution
In two weeks, our two-person team had the app ready to demo to stakeholders. We moved the iVitaFi code base to a private repository on Azure DevOps and enforced private-public key authentication and encryption so that only authorized developers could access it. We also created a proper dev environment on the server. We then set up an automated pipeline so our developers could iterate fixes and improvements much more rapidly.
After seeing the initial results and securing additional funding, iVitaFi authorized 7Factor to rebuild the software on a strong foundation of security, stability, and scalability. For this version, we rewrote the app using .NET core with Angular for frontend development. We also rebuilt the frontend interface using a mobile-first approach. The team utilized lambdas, app services, serverless code, and cloud-based architecture best practices lacking in the original code. We also replaced the single VM with a cloud-based containerization approach using Azure’s App Service to ensure maximum scalability.
In two months, we had accomplished what the 20-person outsourced team couldn’t do in eight months. iVitaFi finally went live and wrote its first loan.
55%
Reduction in manual interventions
50%
Reduction in loan application form pages for patients
70%
Acceleration in time to production
5-star
Client review
What Sets Us Apart
At 7Factor, we live the DevOps principles of continuous improvement and continuous deployment, so manual updates just don’t work for us. We automate everything that can be automated. We distribute responsibility and authority across our cross-functional teams, never allowing a bottleneck where one person or one person’s machine is the only path to deployment. Yet we’re simultaneously obsessive about security. Our security measures included strong database encryption in transit and at rest, database-level IP firewall rules for server access, least privilege access, connection strings and encryption keys stored in hyper secure vaults, and more.
We also take the time to develop a deep understanding of both our client’s objectives and the user’s needs to determine the best technical solution. We embedded ourselves deeply within iVitaFi, working closely with their leadership. We weren’t simply trying to replicate the first version of their app with better code.
“We were doing more than just taking instructions and running with them,” explained 7Factor Software Engineer Amy Maraisane, “We were asking, ‘What is this product? How does it work? Why does it work?”
