Medical coding from the cloud

Swisscoding: Coding correctly or just coding?

As the Swiss leader in the field of medical coding, Swisscoding takes over the coding and associated administrative tasks for more than 50 hospitals and clinics: coding, feedback management, management, training, documents, audits, invoicing, communication with insurers and complaints management.

Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) coding, or medical coding, is the process of converting medical diagnoses, treatments and other healthcare services into standardized codes for billing and analyzing healthcare data.

Starting point: securely and correctly processing DRG invoices for patients outside of healthcare facilities

The company Swisscoding was founded as a specialized team and continues to develop in this sense in order to best meet the needs of its customers. From the very beginning, the idea was to create a pool of coders that would be made available to different customers. This pool of coders should be able to choose their working methods freely in terms of location and time.

Challenge 1

All coders have their own workstation at home. Whether it’s an Apple device or a notebook with various Windows versions, docking stations, one or more monitors. There is no standard and all devices are managed by the employee themselves (applications, virus protection, updates, etc.).

Challenge 2

Access to the healthcare facilities is partly via proprietary VPN solutions. These have to be installed on the end device or only a static IP address is activated on the hospital side. In some cases, direct terminal server access is also permitted or a VMware Horizon or Citrix environment is used.

Challenge 3

The *CASC® work platform is to be made accessible not only to internal coders but also to external hospitals via the internet.

Solution: Run the workplace and the CASC® platform centrally and securely in a Microsoft Azure data center

A “secure bubble” has been created in the Azure Datacenter Switzerland North, where health data is processed and from which secure access to the hospital environment is possible.

The compute part of the CASC® platform runs on an Azure Virtual Machine infrastructure. The data for this is managed in an Azure SQL database. By using an EntraID application proxy and EntraID B2B guest accounts, secure access to the platform can be provided for external users (e.g. hospital employees). Security guidelines such as MFA can also be enforced by Swisscoding.

Due to the various proprietary VPN solutions that also activate a full tunnel to a hospital, a multi-user environment, as would be possible with Azure Virtual Desktop, was not used.

Instead, Windows 365 Cloud PC was used to create a dedicated, secure and Microsoft Intune-managed workplace in the cloud for all coders. From there, they work with the platform via direct virtual network integration in Azure.

Instead, Windows 365 Cloud PC was used to create a dedicated, secure and Microsoft Intune-managed workplace in the cloud for all coders. From there, they work with the platform via direct virtual network integration in Azure.

Regardless of the status of the end device used to access the cloud PC, the work itself takes place in a secure and managed environment. No data can be copied via the end device.

All other Microsoft 365 products, such as Teams for internal meetings and training, can also only be used within this Windows 365 cloud PC environment.

The collaboration with TwinCap First was absolutely crucial to the successful development of our company. Without the close support of the TwinCap First team, we would not have been able to find the solutions we needed for our daily work, and above all, we would not have been able to implement them successfully.

The solution developed by TwinCap First enables us to stand out from other market players and to work more efficiently both internally and in providing our customers with the right answers to the challenges they face.

Stefan Stefaniak CEO Swisscoding Group AG