ucura: Streamlining access to personalized home care with a secure, scalable platform
About ucura
Based in Germany, ucura creates digital services that streamline bureaucracy to help people access and organize the best possible home care for their relatives. Founded in 2020, the company cooperates with strategic healthcare industry partners to provide a comprehensive, one-stop interface that maps personalized outpatient care journeys from start to finish.
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Contact usucura works with Google Cloud to provide a secure and scalable home care platform while offering a streamlined user-friendly experience.
Google Cloud results
- Generates care application documents for all German insurers in under two seconds with Cloud Functions
- Facilitates international expansion in compliance with local data security regulations
- Supports rapid growth while enabling effective cost management with autoscaling
Secures sensitive data with containerized applications
In Germany, 80% of people in need of care are looked after at home. When you take into account the fact that, according to the World Health Organization, we’re living longer than ever, it’s likely that more and more people will find themselves caring for relatives over the years to come.
The German company ucura believes that by relieving patients and their relatives of the bureaucracy that comes with home care, it can help them receive better, more personalized and comprehensive support. Armando Statti, one of ucura's co-founders, was inspired by his experience as a childhood transplant recipient to create the company. “Armando knows firsthand that more can be done to support care patients and their family members,” Markus Wild, ucura co-founder and CTO, explains. “We realized that as a team and through our complementary skills we were ideally suited to build a solution to help care patients and their relatives. Why us? Because Armando has many years of experience in developing medical products from a regulatory and user experience point of view while my background is in developing AI systems and scaling them within companies.”
ucura launched the DeinePflege (which translates as “your care”) platform in 2020 to help people streamline the process of accessing and organizing the best possible home care. DeinePflege was in need of a flexible, scalable infrastructure that would meet the needs of its growing business while providing a stringent, secure environment for sensitive personal data. For these reasons, ucura turned to Google Cloud.
“People trust us with very sensitive information. One of our main reasons for opting for Google Cloud was the need to work with a provider who takes data protection seriously.”
—Markus Wild, co-founder and CTO, ucuraHelping care patients and their relatives get the support they need
Navigating bureaucracy can be overwhelming for family members who are already facing the demands of caring for an incapacitated relative. “But the process of applying for care benefits is just one aspect. Often, there are services available that provide valuable support, but people don’t apply for them because they aren’t aware they exist,” Wild explains. The platform seeks to empower users by providing information in plain, simple language: “We make everything easy to understand for people who are not involved in the healthcare sector, so they can decide what is best for them.”
When users connect to DeinePflege for the first time, they are asked a series of questions that enable the service to create a patient’s “care context.” The user is then provided with recommendations for services they should apply for, such as nursing care, home help, or financial support. Each recommendation is linked to an action button that users can click through to apply directly to insurance and healthcare providers. Integration of these partners into the platform provides a seamless experience that enables users to access their documents, care plan, and providers from within one interface.
“With each application, we receive more insights into the patient’s needs. This enables us to make increasingly personalized recommendations as we go on,” Wild continues. The company works with an extensive partner ecosystem of insurance, healthcare, and medical device providers, with data protection a major priority. “People trust us with very sensitive information. One of our main reasons for opting for Google Cloud was the need to work with a provider who takes data protection seriously,” Wild says.
“We chose Google Firestore as a central data repository, which was a great choice. It’s super scalable, which is what we need, as we have big plans for the future. It’s also cost-effective as it scales according to the amount of requests, so we only pay for what we use.”
—Markus Wild, co-founder and CTO, ucuraBuilding a fast, secure, and user-friendly platform
“The fact that several major healthcare brands work with Google Cloud was a big incentive. That reassured us that we were going in the right direction,” Wild says. The DeinePflege technology stack is built on Google Kubernetes Engine. Microservices are deployed in Kubernetes clusters and secured with Istio. “This provides us with a level of data security that’s appropriate for the highly sensitive area we operate in,” Wild says. At the same time, Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides control and visibility over access to resources.
The company’s digital products and website are built with Angular and made available via App Engine instances. The platform uses Cloud Functions to generate care application documents for users. “Cloud Functions is really scalable and fast: in one or two seconds users have a fully rendered document, making a very smooth customer experience,” Wild adds. At the same time, Cloud Vision is used to scan, extract, and integrate data from prescriptions.
“From the beginning, Google provided us with great support,” Wild says, “The Google Subject Matter Experts helped us work out a plan, validate it, and decide where to go next. We chose Firestore as a central data repository, which was a great choice. It’s super scalable, which is what we need, as we have big plans for the future. It’s also cost-effective as it scales according to the amount of requests, so we only pay for what we use.”
“Google supports us on both a personal and technological level, and we look forward to continuing to work closely with Google Cloud in the future. We have a similar attitude, in that we want to make a difference. It’s that mindset that enables you to do really big things.”
—Markus Wild, co-founder and CTO, ucuraLooking to the future with comprehensive care journeys
The company is looking forward to developing solutions that will not only help with the process of applying for and obtaining support, but also enable relatives and healthcare staff to better organize their daily routines. “Managing care is complex, especially when there are several parties involved,” Wild explains. “One of our next steps will be to create applications that improve visibility into who is doing what and reassure people that their relatives are receiving the best possible care.” ucura is also looking at how data from medical equipment, such as blood sugar monitoring devices, can be integrated into care journeys.
ucura is also looking at a potential international expansion. “Working with Google Cloud will facilitate that aspect, as Google has data centers all over the world. That means that wherever we offer our services, we’ll be compliant with local data regulations,” Wild says. This future expansion will further strengthen its relationship with Google Cloud.
“Google supports us on both a personal and technological level, and we look forward to continuing to work closely with Google Cloud in the future,” says Wild. “We have a similar attitude, in that we want to make a difference. It’s that mindset that enables you to do really big things.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About ucura
Based in Germany, ucura creates digital services that streamline bureaucracy to help people access and organize the best possible home care for their relatives. Founded in 2020, the company cooperates with strategic healthcare industry partners to provide a comprehensive, one-stop interface that maps personalized outpatient care journeys from start to finish.