Jenkins is the way to deploy a truly functional and efficient system to manage build pipelines

Improving Health Care

Submitted By Jenkins User Joseph Tole
sing AI to help insurers transform from reactively paying for people’s health to actively helping people manage their health.
Organization: Canadian research firm aiming to help people protect and improve their health by transforming health insurance.
Industries: Artificial Intelligence
Programming Languages: Node.js, Python, Typescript
Version Control Systems: GitHub
Community Support: Jenkins Users Google Group or IRC Chat, Jenkins.io websites & blogs

Helping health insurers modernize with the help of AI & Jenkins.

Background: We believe the effective use of new open data will allow insurers to transform from passively paying for health to actively helping people stay healthy. Our company offers dynamic benefits and personalized value-added services with responsive health AI. We help insurers put health improvement at the center of products to better manage risks and then intelligently target preventive care, reward people for health, and create more inclusive products. At the core of all this is the software, which we needed to automate the build, test, and deployment phases, while ensuring security and auditing.Goals:  Improving health insurance through better understanding of customers. 

"Jenkins made this project rock by having the tools, documentation, and examples I needed, Plus a great community of people to assist."
image— Joseph Tole, Senior DevOps Engineer

Solution & Results: When I joined the company, Jenkins was being used but it was poorly configured in non-optimal ways. One example is that the company was using custom-built 3rd party code which replicated pre-existing Jenkins functionality as it was implemented by non DevOps who had little or no previous Jenkins experience or training. 

There was a collection of bad practices that led to bad solutions. Through my experience with Jenkins, I have been (happily) refactoring methods, eliminating and/or correcting poor configurations, and bringing the build and deploy pipelines into a "happy place" while educating my colleagues about "better" ways to manage the system.

The results are many, but here are the top three:

  • Build times are faster 

  • De-duplication of Jenkins code via JTE, JSL, etc. 

  • Accountability via DSL to eliminate previous point-and-click defined jobs