Bupa Wellness Portal

The challenge

During Covid, Bupa reached out to the team at Arcadian looking for a better delivery service for their corporate wellbeing offering. This would encompass loyalty products right through to digital delivery of corporate skin check, flu and wellbeing reports provided by medical providers throughout Australia. Loyalty would be the initial focus of the platform but the final product was required to include eCommerce, a large number of third-party API integrations, custom webhooks, dynamic PDF generation and an array of promotional requirements

The final requirement was around security. This wasn’t surprising – with the number of cyber issues going on around the world, the storage of medical data was of the utmost importance. We needed to ensure the platform was secure with bi-annual penetration tests by third-party providers as a requirement.

Our approach

Building a platform to allow it to do almost anything without over-investing initially is a challenge. As we’d built dozens of similar platforms in the past with penetration tests successfully being passed, we chose to follow the framework we used on previous builds which was a custom Ruby on Rails application.

This allowed us to 100% know what code was running rather than using WordPress, Magento, Sitecore, Umbraco, Craft CMS, Contentful or another off-the-shelf CMS. It also allowed us to structure it in a way that we could easily scale and plug-in functionality as it was required while still ensuring the platform was maintainable. We would be 100% certain of what entry points were active in the app (by this we mean what API endpoints existed and what webhooks were available so no data could be compromised).

Arcadian also architected the infrastructure and DevOps including network design, server setup, database design, firewall configuration and hardening. We chose AWS as the hosting platform using Network Load Balancers, Auto Scaling Groups, EC2s, RDSs, S3, Cloudwatch and CodePipeline/CodeBuild and Code Deploy for CI/CD.

Once we figured out the technology aspect, we began the UX/UI design process. This ensured we had scalable navigation to allow for future functionality while also aligning with Bupa’s established branding.

The outcome

The current Bupa Wellness Portal has now been active since 2019, and its size has increased tenfold from the initial platform. It has never required a rebuild – only updates and maintenance.