Security, Compliance, and a Swiss Cloud-Native Foundation
Founded in 1996, Health Info Net AG (HIN) is the trusted provider of secure digital communication for the Swiss healthcare system. It connects hospitals, clinics, medical practices, pharmacies, insurers and authorities through the HIN Vertrauensraum. While this trust space serves as the collaborative environment, the organisation’s security is anchored by an ISO-certified ISMS and an EPR-certified HIN eID, ensuring strict adherence to international standards and federal requirements for the Swiss Electronic Patient Record. With services like encrypted email, digital identity and secure application access, HIN ensures compliance, data protection, and interoperability across the sector.
In 2023, HIN launched Project Phoenix, an ambitious program to rebuild and refactor its core services. The catalyst was the rapid evolution of regulatory and technological requirements in the healthcare sector. While HIN’s existing platform had reliably supported secure communication for many years, it had been designed for a different technological context.
To ensure that the platform would continue to meet future requirements in areas such as scalability, interoperability and modern development practices, HIN decided to initiate a comprehensive renewal of its core services.
The 'Old Paradigm' was characterised by slow, risky change cycles due to the use of monolithic applications and reliance on manual processes, such as ordering virtual machines (VMs). Recognising that previous attempts at modernisation were constantly interrupted by daily demands, HIN made the strategic decision to build a new, parallel platform. This parallel approach was crucial because it ensured that daily business could continue uninterrupted while the new foundation was being constructed. The project set three clear priorities: Security, Agility, and Compliance.
HIN partnered with Adfinis to access the dedicated resources and deep expertise needed for Project Phoenix. Adfinis was involved from the start, delivering expert consulting to shape the overall platform design. The execution was defined by a close collaboration between Adfinis and HIN, characterised by exceptional transparency and a shared vision for the platform's future. HIN maintained overall architectural ownership and strategic governance of the platform throughout the project. The partnership with Adfinis was designed to complement HIN’s internal team with specialised DevOps and platform engineering capabilities, ensuring a seamless transition to modern infrastructure.
While HIN managed the overarching project direction, Adfinis was tasked with designing and implementing the crucial DevOps Backbone:
Adfinis’s end-to-end involvement ensured the new platform would be powered by a robust, fully automated pipeline. With Adfinis managing these core components, HIN was able to transition effectively to a containerised, cloud-native paradigm.
The transparency across the entire partnership was exceptional; it truly allowed us to move as a unified team toward a successful outcome.
Urs Fischer | Business Development & Innovation Manager HIN
Adfinis’s core task was to define the comprehensive operational framework and governance model for GitLab, transforming the platform into HIN’s organisational blueprint for modern development. This involved establishing standards for people, process, and technology to ensure seamless adoption and enablement across the organisation. HIN required a highly customised, secure setup, even compared to other sensitive industries.
Adfinis built the organisational model directly inside GitLab, standardising how teams organise work across the company. The resulting blueprint includes access rights, group structures, and workflows, enabling HIN to transition seamlessly from classical structures to product teams. A key component of this agility is Documentation as Code. Adfinis enabled HIN to treat documentation, processes, and code consistently, with all architecture and design recorded in repositories based on Adfinis's templates.
Adfinis shaped GitLab within HIN, bringing deep expertise and improving usability through enhancements such as wiki search. Critically, Adfinis's status as a primary GitLab contributor meant HIN partnered with a firm that not only implemented the solution but possessed the capacity to genuinely contribute to the platform’s further development, guaranteeing high-level future customisation and support.
The new platform, underpinned by the customised GitLab setup, met all defined SLAs and demonstrated stability from the outset.
Handling dozens of millions of emails annually, including approximately 500,000 communications to patients, HIN operates at a significant scale that demands absolute reliability. The platform successfully maintained this volume with zero incidents during the customer migration, proving stable scaling under heavy load. This transformation strengthened HIN's internal IT and product capabilities. By working closely with its partners during the implementation, HIN’s teams were able to expand their expertise in cloud-native development, DevSecOps practices, and platform operations.
While decommissioning legacy services will yield cost savings, HIN's primary focus is strategic growth. The new platform and its standardised organisational blueprint are explicitly designed for high scalability, enabling HIN to rapidly and seamlessly onboard both external companies and internal product teams.
Adfinis provided the specialised expertise and flexibility needed for our complex environment. Their ability to deliver a truly tailored solution sets them apart from partners using a more standardized, 'assembly line' approach. Urs Fischer, Business Development & Innovation Manager, HIN
Urs Fischer | Business Development & Innovation Manager, HIN
HIN required a partner capable of delivering a secure platform aligned with the principles of long-term control and flexibility. Three strategic pillars defined Adfinis's engagement:
Open source technologies represent a core strategic principle for both HIN and Adfinis, ensuring HIN's freedom from vendor lock-in and providing complete control over the application stack. This aligned with Adfinis’s core competency, ensuring the DevOps Backbone was built on highly auditable, secure and customisable open source technologies.
The system adheres to HIN's governance model and the high regulatory standards associated with ISO 27001 certification.
Adfinis and VSHN, as Swiss DevOps partners, ensured local expertise and were key in delivering the required 24/7 support from Switzerland.
This offered HIN a fully compliant, locally managed service that leveraged Adfinis's global expertise with a regional focus.
Adfinis delivered a highly tailored approach by focusing on fitting the service precisely to HIN's unique requirements, rather than forcing the project into a rigid, standardised delivery model. This flexibility extended across the entire implementation, from initial consulting through final execution, ensuring HIN received the specialised solution necessary for its complex environment.
Technologies
GitLab is a comprehensive DevSecOps platform providing source code management, continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD), and collaboration tools for the entire software development lifecycle.
Grafana is an open and composable platform for data visualisation and observability. It enables users to query, visualise, and analyse metrics, logs, and traces from diverse sources through unified dashboards, supporting real-time monitoring and alerting.
Vault is a tool that help organisations keep their data safe by securely managing access to secrets, like passwords, API keys, and sensitive information. With Vault, you can control who accesses what, ensuring only authorised users or applications have the necessary keys. Adfinis helps you get the most out of Vault with setup, support, and training tailored to your needs. This way, your team can confidently manage sensitive data and streamline security, even in complex cloud environments.
