BioIntelliSense Delivers Continuous Patient Monitoring with MongoDB

BioIntelliSense is ushering in a new era of continuous health monitoring. The medical technology company’s BioButton® wearable device captures vital signs and physiological biometrics, helping clinicians provide proactive patient care through advanced monitoring and early detection. The solution consists of three integrated components: the BioButton device, which collects patient data; the BioCloud™ platform, which ingests and processes that data; and the BioDashboard™ clinical interface, where healthcare providers monitor and analyze patient information.

The first version of the BioDashboard interface was built on a third-party application using SQL Server. However, the database architecture was reaching its scalability limits and becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. “Our previous SQL Server–based system couldn’t scale with the growth expected from our business,” said Tim Posey, Senior Director of Clinical Applications at BioIntelliSense.

Because the solution monitors patient vital signs and generates notifications of potential medical conditions, unplanned downtime wasn’t an option. In 2023, the stakes became even higher as the BioButton system gained market traction and patient volumes increased dramatically.

The BioDashboard interface needed to scale seamlessly to support tens of thousands of concurrent patients while maintaining consistent performance for both data ingestion from devices and access by clinicians. Given the sensitive nature of patient health data, the platform also required enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities.

BioIntelliSense chose MongoDB Atlas on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the foundation for the BioDashboard interface. The scalability of AWS, combined with MongoDB’s developer-friendly approach and robust support for Internet of Things workloads, made MongoDB Atlas on AWS the clear choice.

Marshal Dhillon, Senior Vice President of Engineering

BioIntelliSense rebuilt the entire BioDashboard architecture with MongoDB Atlas at its core. When a patient wears a BioButton device, it transmits vital signs and biometric data via Bluetooth to a BioHub® device. These BioHubs, which can each support multiple BioButton devices, send the data over the internet to the BioCloud platform, BioIntelliSense’s main data ingestion system. BioCloud uses MongoDB Time Series Collections to manage the monitoring platform’s intensive dual workloads: processing thousands of incoming data points per second while simultaneously supporting queries from BioDashboard in near real time. This capability is essential for healthcare environments, where even minor data processing or access delays could impact patient care.

Using the BioDashboard interface, clinicians can quickly locate patient information with MongoDB Atlas Search, which provides intuitive search capabilities — including partial name matching and fuzzy search — as the user types. With these capabilities, providers no longer need to enter the exact patient IDs or precise spellings of patient names to find the information they need, which previously wouldn’t return accurate results if entered incorrectly.

Furthermore, the BioIntelliSense team was able to save time using MongoDB Atlas Search, which doesn’t require setting up a separate search provider or an additional vendor. And with Atlas Search, the company improved the overall developer experience. “It’s very easy to get started with Atlas Search,” said Posey. “My data is right there already in the database, so there’s no need to pay an engineer to transfer the data. It’s super easy to click a few buttons to set up a search index, as the resistance to getting stuff done is so low, which is why I enjoy it and why we use Atlas Search today.”

The BioDashboard interface also analyzes incoming data streams to generate notifications when patient vital signs indicate potential medical conditions. Medical professionals can monitor hundreds of patients simultaneously through virtual command centers and coordinate with onsite staff when intervention is needed.

Using MongoDB Atlas on AWS, BioIntelliSense now has a robust foundation to support these critical healthcare needs and scale to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent patients with consistent performance. More importantly, the system has maintained 100% uptime since it was launched, providing clinicians with uninterrupted access to patient data.

“About 8 to 10 months ago, we were pushing our old system to its absolute limits,” said Marshal Dhillon, Senior Vice President of Engineering at BioIntelliSense. “Since then, our volume has increased significantly. The new MongoDB system is performing orders of magnitude more efficiently.”

Tim Posey, Senior Director of Clinical Applications

With the new system, BioIntelliSense is realizing its vision of a healthcare platform without technical limitations. The platform’s performance has exceeded expectations with the ability to ingest high volumes of time series data from thousands of devices simultaneously. In the meantime, it also supports near real-time analysis and clinician queries to empower healthcare providers to monitor patients more effectively.

As a heavy writer and reader of time series data, the company is looking forward to further performance improvements when it upgrades to MongoDB 8.0. MongoDB 8.0 brings 36% better read throughput, 56% faster bulk writes, and 200% faster complex aggregations of times series data. “The real-world gains that we’re seeing are amazing, and we are impressed with the new performance levels on Atlas,” said Daniel Chou, Vice President of Cloud Engineering at BioIntelliSense. “We’ve identified about 25% of our spend that we can downgrade or use for additional headroom as we continue to grow our device base.”

BioIntelliSense’s development team also enjoys fewer database administration tasks, which increases productivity. Developers at BioIntelliSense report being happier when they work with MongoDB, empowering them to focus on building innovative features.

With this platform, BioIntelliSense is transforming patient care by creating virtual command centers to monitor hundreds of patients simultaneously and proactively identify those needing attention, moving healthcare away from scheduled check-ins to data-driven early intervention. Having secured FDA clearance for the BioButton device in the United States, the company is rapidly expanding its footprint in healthcare facilities and home care settings. Next, BioIntelliSense is exploring tools such as Atlas Vector Search to enhance the future of digital care even further.

“MongoDB has become the foundation of our future success,” said Posey. “We’re looking forward to adopting whatever new capabilities come to MongoDB Atlas.”