 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and while this year's event is being held virtually, which means we are talking to all of the guests, where they are coming from. One of the things that we always love about the user conferences is talking to the practitioners themselves. And Red Hat Summit, of course, we love talking to customers and really happy to welcome to the program, Alejandro Lopez Asornio, who is the director of eHealth with the Argentine Ministry of Health, coming to us from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Alejandro, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me Stu. All right, so look, healthcare obviously is normally challenging in the midst of what is happening globally. There are strains and pressures on what is happening, so really appreciate you taking the time with us. Tell us a little bit about the organization and your role and IT's role in supporting the company's mission. Yes, I'm part of the Ministry of Health in Argentina. Argentina is a federal country, has a national Ministry of Health, a coordinate healthcare, a healthcare system all around the country with different provinces. We work with the Ministry of Health of each province, with the governor of each province, trying to maintain a coordination in the healthcare system and we create national policies that try everybody should apply on their systems. So we create national incentive. This is much more, a bit similar to the US where the national government creates incentives so the provinces, the states adopt new practices and best quality of care. Excellent, so anytime we talk about healthcare, medical records of course critically important, that's usually a key piece of IT, governance, compliance in general. So what are some of the challenges that the Ministry faces when it comes to this piece of overall healthcare? My role in the Ministry of Health is exactly that, is to coordinate health information systems around the country and having an access to the single source of medical records around the country is a great thing that we're trying to achieve. We don't want to have a central repository but we want to have some kind of hub that allows you to access information all around the country. So the fragmentation of the system between different provinces and also having public providers and private providers is a challenge because the information for one patient is stored in a lot of different places. I need to have some kind of hub or enterprise service that allows you to gather this information at the point of care and to provide the best quality of care to the patient having the whole record regardless of where he was taking care before. Yeah, it's a pretty universal challenge you're talking about there, distributed architecture, obviously, security of paramount performance but still has to have the scale in performance that customers need. Bring us in a little bit this project. How long has this national health information system? How long has it been to put that together? Bring us through a little bit as to how you choose how to architect these pieces. Exactly, we've been working in this for the last three years and the idea was to create an architecture that was not invasive, that anyone can collaborate and contribute to this information network but still having all the rights and all the responsibility for maintaining their own data. And we didn't want to have a central database that is susceptible to security issues or privacy issues. We wanted information to remain distributed but to be able to collect that at some point. So the idea was to create a set of APIs based on healthcare interoperability standards that allow developers of clinical systems all around the country to adopt this new way of exchanging information, secure and privately and provide this tool to their practitioners so they can access information in other centers. Excellent, and so three years, that's a rather big project. You've got quite a lot of constituents and obviously healthcare is completely essential and critical service there. Underneath the pieces, obviously, we're part of Red Hat Summit covering this. So help us understand a little bit, Red Hat and any other partners, what technologies are using to deliver this. Yeah, the big challenge was to have this kind of distributed organization with a central hub that needs to provide services all around the country at any time of the day. And people need to be confident that they can use this network to retrieve patient data. We don't want them to try to do it and fail and they'll lost confidence on that. In order to have the greater adoption from system developers, we need to have a very strong and confident network. And this can grow really exponentially. Health data has, I mean, NHS is conducting like one billion ripers a month or something like that. So we know it can grow exponentially. So we need to have some kind of infrastructure that was reliable and was easy to deploy the first time but that has a growth roadmap that will allow us to incorporate all the hospital facilities around Argentina in a safe way. And we need to be confident that we can grow to those levels. So basically, we were working already with Red Hat Linux and all the basic things and we wanted to go to OpenShift. What's really important to be able to have the container orchestration system that allows us to expand according to the needs and the adoption rate that was really unpredictable because we need to create incentives for adoption but you never know how fast the adoption will be. So we needed to have some flexible infrastructure like OpenShift but also we need to use APIs like FreeScale in order to provide this way to communicate APIs to give people secure forms to access the APIs and to learn about them and to try. So we are using different parts of the stack in Red Hat in order to do that. Okay, great. Tell us the adoption of this solution. How was the learning curve? You know, moving to containerized architectures, you're talking about all the APIs in there. How much was there a retraining of your group? Were there any new people that came in? You know, what was Red Hat's role in really the organizational pieces of getting everybody on this new skill set? Well, the role of Red Hat was central because we didn't have the capability to go and research all these open source tools and find the proper combination between the container administrator, the orchestrator, the continuous integration part. It was really difficult for us to start from scratch. I mean, this is something that is available but you need to have a huge team, a lot of time and special skills. And we had, our teams were used to work in monolithic applications with very long development cycles but every time you need a change, you need to have like three months in order to see the change live in the application for the end user. So we need to make a radical change there. So we saw in Red Hat the opportunity to have a roadmap and the container adoption program and cast all the steps that we need to go through. So it was really good to have our existing team to retrain and to go through the container adoption program to use the combination of tools that Red Hat already provides like a stack that's already compatible with each other that you need to know that that it's easy to update when there are changes when there are security things that you need to change, you get the notification. So this, and you have the daily support also because we had to create a new brand of developers and the DevOps team was non-existent. You have developers and very technical person that didn't know anything about the application. So we had to create these tools that these new roles that combine these activities and the day-to-day work with Red Hat experts was really key to that because they gave us the roadmap about what we need to do with a timeframe with a set of things that we need to do in order and they give us the daily support to retrain our team and they were really excited to work in this technology but something that also was really good news for them because they were using all versions of Java and all versions of deployment systems that do everything by heart in the common line. And now when they learn to do that with Ansible and with the continuous integration systems a lot of menial tasks that they were doing every day now they're automated. So that had a really great impact on the quality of the team. Well, it's interesting that you talk about that. Automation, of course, has been something we've been talking about for decades but critically important today. Alejandro, I'm curious with kind of the situation happening with the pandemic, people are having to work from home that there needs to be social distancing. The automation and some of this new tooling what impact has that had on being able to deal with today's work environment? That's a very good impact also because not only for the automation because that is really good. People have a secure way to work from home to deploy servers. You don't need to access directly each one of the servers with a root logging and things like that. It's much more secure, much safer and much easier to work from home and maintaining the system like this but also the pandemic has put a strain on the system because we are maintaining in open shift the whole epidemiological surveillance system for Argentina and that has much more information going through all the decision-making politicians are getting information from the surveillance system and are to make predictions to the style policies and that information needs to be available all the time. And previously when a new strain came like this usually the system went down or when it was slow working slowly. So but now with open shift we were able to dial up and more resources to the system and maintain the quality of service to all the epidemiology network and to all the decision-making persons and this information just in time. All right, so Alhannara, we've talked about kind of the transformation that you've had, there's the government impact, there's the other providers of services. If you talk about the ultimate end patient, what is the impact on them for what you've implemented here? Well, the idea is that the patients now will be able to move between different parts of this complex health system we have seamlessly. Before it was very common that the patient arrived to a hospital with a bag full of studies in paper like a summary from a previous hospital, images, lab reports and they have to bring them back to the doctor and doctor to go to all the papers to understand the patient. Or a patient goes from a province to the capital to get care by the specialists and they go back and the doctor in the province don't have any information about what happened in Buenos Aires. I know they took good care of you but the only information I get is through the patient. But now I think this system will integrate all the caregivers around Argentina in a much more simpler way. He will be able to collaborate with doctors in other provinces, in other cities and the patient will be able to go from private to public to have different kinds of procedures and the information will follow him and everyone will be able to take care of him with the best information possible. Well, Alejandra, that's really powerful pieces there. So I guess the last piece is also a little bit about kind of where you are with the overall project. What future goals do you have for this initiative? I think we're really happy with this. We are starting to have adoption. We have more than 37 nodes that are already working in this network. And so this is really good. We have the good adoption rate and the implementation in OpenShift is going really well. The developers are really happy. We see the impact that there are no downtime. It's really good. We need to continue transforming all legacy applications, minority applications to transform that into microservices. So there is work to do in deconstructing these big applications into more scalable microservices. And we need to take more advantage of three scales. It has to be really excellent features for developer portals and things like that. I would think it would be the adoption of this API that shows information much simpler when we give all those tools developing. Oh, that's, once again, Alejandra, thank you so much. This has been really important work that your team is doing. Congratulations on the progress that you made and definitely hope in the future, we will get to see you at one of the Red Hat Summits in person. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. All right, lots more covered from theCUBE at Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.