A mobile solution

Knowing that mobile devices and mobile apps are the preferred platform for many Australians these days – especially younger ones – Lifeblood approached Certus Digital to develop a mobile app to help achieve their goal of providing a better donor experience. 

The goal was to design an app that donors can use to find out if they are currently eligible to donate, find their nearest donation centre and make and manage appointments. New donors are able to register via the app while existing donors can use it to access their donation history and personal data. 

Integrations

Of course, the new app would need to be more than a standalone solution. For it to work seamlessly and result in efficiency gains, the app needed to be integrated with Lifeblood’s existing systems and workflows. 

Certus Digital collaborated with Lifeblood to lay the foundations of a secure and robust API  architecture built on top of AWS’s rich service ecosystem. The team worked together to orchestrate the requests across multiple backend systems ensuring integrity and consistency of the appointment management process. By utilising the AWS’s serverless infrastructure such as API Gateway, Lambda and Step Functions, Lifeblood was able to achieve an extensible, maintainable and dynamically scalable solution to support its growing base of more than half a million active donors. 

The API provides a simple and secure transactional façade to the core Lifeblood systems to manage appointment slots, give donors an indication of their eligibility and health statistics, and provide a way to view and manage their upcoming appointments and past donations. The change management is supported by the robust DevOps processes involving automated integration testing and the ability to incrementally version and update the APIs, thereby removing the need for maintenance outages and disruptions to donors.

Data Security

Data security is one area that was extremely important to Lifeblood. Given the organisation is dealing with personal and private information, it was essential that data storage and sharing would be extremely secure and reliable. The Certus Digital team addressed this challenge by designing a middleware layer between the app and Lifeblood’s other systems to make sure the access into the backend systems is as secure as possible. In addition, the two-factor authentication in the app ensures a robust authentication process is in place for users wanting to access their own information. Using this approach, every request is encrypted and authenticated using the OpenID Connect authentication standards. Secure integration with the B2C identity provider therefore ensures that the donor can only ever access their own information and must do so in a secure manner.

A holistic approach to data security extends to all layers of the solution, such as ensuring that the cloud backups are restricted, that the data is securely encrypted on personal devices and that no personally identifiable information is ever logged or retained in transit. Certus Digital worked with Lifeblood to define metrics and alarms that would detect and alert the administrators to security and operational anomalies as soon as they occur.