Business goal: Business goal – building a cloud platform to transform the way that pharmacies operate. 

 

Omnicell, a pioneer in intelligent medication-management solutions, is in the process of building a cloud platform to transform the way that the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries operate. 

Omnicell services thousands of customers with 10,000+ devices/cabinets in 50+ hospitals and retail pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens. The company’s North Star 

– a cloud platform that can support the industry’s Autonomous Pharmacy vision, – will be a zero-error, zero-waste, fully-optimized next-generation platform that will help enable safe, secure and simple overall health care for patients. Adopting Kublr – an EastBanc Technologies-incubated enterprise-grade Kubernetes (K8s) and container management platform– enables Omnicell to successfully build and manage the new cloud platform. 

The solution 

A “bold new vision for the future of medication management,” the Autonomous Pharmacy “seeks to replace manual, error-prone activities with automated processes that are safer and more efficient.” Omnicell’s expertise lies in pharmacy automation, and, in order to do this at scale, solutions need to be connected, portable, reliable and secure. Built around an IoT-connected automated medication dispensing system, putting smart, connected medication management hardware on premise, Omnicell’s cloud platform will accomplish just what the industry envisions.   

 

“The Kublr team has provided guidance around Kubernetes adoption and utilization to speed up our journey to a Kubernetes-centric infrastructure.” Igor Palant, Director of Engineering, Omnicell 

 

This is how it works: A server controls the IoT cabinet, and IT locally hosts the server. The cabinet interfaces with hospital information systems (i.e., a group of services including patient data). Omnicell provisions and manages the lifecycle of the cabinets, using a cloud service running on Kubernetes clusters in Azure for full applications and infrastructure life cycle automation. 

Kublr centrally provisions and manages Kubernetes clusters, log collection and monitoring, security and authentication integrating with Okta. Application developers are required to use multi-factor authentication. 

Results and business impact 

When the new Omnicell cloud platform is ready for launch, Kublr will be at the heart of the infrastructure. Kublr helps Omnicell automate all aspects of Kubernetes lifecycle management. It provides enterprise features, such as SSO integration for all parts of Kubernetes infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, Centralized Log, Metric and Tracing collection. The Kublr team has provided guidance around Kubernetes adoption and utilization to speed up Omnicell’s journey to implementation of Kubernetes-centric infrastructure.